THE EGO HAS LANDED: sifting through 71 months in austin

I had this dream the other day where I was swimming down the creek that leads from Barton Springs, well, more like I was being pushed by the current, perhaps we’d recently had a big Texas spring rain, out to the lake, what folks around here call Lady Bird Lake, which is actually a river, Colorado River, though not the Colorado River, but a Colorado River. It’s a familiar float, of the poor, unemployed days, of the puppy-swimming-practice era, of the more recent, just-about-outta-here period. In this dream, it didn’t pop with the canine spirit & freeing feeling of usual. The water, like the sky, was dim & I was alone, treading along. I kept intersecting something like lily pads, plastic bags, pudding skins; when turned up, they turned out to be faces, the faces of folks I’ve lost in my time in Austin--buddies come disconnected, friends who moved away or moved on, loved ones that done died. I arrived at the last one, a face I couldn’t recognize, & right before being spit out into the lake with the nutria, some plastic bottles, & those bravest paddle boarders, I put it on; in the reflection of the water, it was my own.

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“We are not who we were not very long ago.” - Rebecca Solnit

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I’d lived in two towns, one state, before I came to Austin, Texas six years ago--my hometown of Elwood & my college city of Muncie, Indiana.  Coated in a layer of naivete & lack of exposure back then, I still navigated the world with the Golden Rule, learned from the banner in Mrs. Jones’ fourth grade class -- “Treat others the way you want to be treated.” -- a worldview laughable, lacking nuance, & unstable, to say the least.
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There’s a part of me still a child, & yeah, I know that’s how most adults feel, but often they crush it to keep it down deep. The ones that do let it out, often let it run wild, bloating on gummy bears or passing out in the ditch over too much fun. For me, it’s a touch more literal, this fragmented little feller that has needs & moments, fears & joys. Honestly, he still likes the smell of dirt & is more than a little bit scared, though he’ll go in, of natural bodies of water. It’s also the part of me that finds comfort in list-making.

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Here, let me tell you about some of my favorite nature spots in the Austin-area. Like the Flying Armadillo Disc Golf Compound, which was once a big patch of briars & a whole lot of dust & is now a strange disc golf paradise, complete with camping, a disc golf putt-putt course, & a surely-built-without-a-permit three-story gazebo thing. Like Turkey Creek Trail, which we just did our last hike at the other morning, a pretty three-mile, off-leash loop where Bo occasionally goes missing for eight minutes & Ginny always gets very wet. Like Red Bud Isle, a closer, smaller looped off-leash park where the pups love to meet each & every dog & human, except for that one guy who stuck a stick in his back pocket & then acted weird when dogs chased his butt. Like McKinney Falls State Park, which has to be high on the list of most beautiful spots within shouting distance of a major airport. Like the property owned by our friends The Pryors in Dripping Spring, which is where you’ll mostly hear me say things like “goodness gracious, will you look at that.”

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Hanging with my childhood friend KC the other day, her last of three-summers-in-a-row visits, we admitted how we both always carried this natural openness to others, to folks who are different than us, be it culture or ideology or neurological make-up, but it wasn’t until we found ourselves in more-diverse (though still admittedly segregated & not-all-that-diverse) college towns did we finally have the exposure to put that drive to the test, in terms of growth & connection. It was also in this stepping-out of our small town, that we first met people who were actually similar to us, be it the rough-around-the-edges multipolar empath or the neurotic well-meaning over-rationalizer, introductions that allowed us to see ourselves more clearly. We both love book-learning, but it’s the oral story, the shared experience, & the hands-on missteps & relations that drive us forward.

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I’ve met many folks who abandoned the small town lifestyle of their raising, never to look back. On the flipside, I still have many friends & family members who never left. I’m realizing how necessary it was for me to leave as a mechanism for seeing clearly the parts of that culture & those experiences that I don’t value or agree with, but also to reconnect with the traits & activities that feel necessary & truly a part of my identity.  When I entered the Michener Center for Writers on a poetry writing fellowship back in 2014, someone joked that I was a “feller,” over a fellow. It became this running gag, my hickishness as my sign of other, be it in the hollering of my poems, my distrust of city living, or the cliches of drinking, anger, etc. Separated from the rural culture that honed me, I could see more of that hooting & hollering within myself, whereas back there, I was the artsy one, the weird one, the less-masculine one, the more liberal one, you get my point.

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“I give away a little bit about myself each time I speak.” - Camille T. Dungy

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I’ll never forget being one of four white people at the Huston-Tillotson basketball game on the night of the 2016 election. I’ll never forget Quentin & Sam, the fellers who lived in the alley behind my first apartment here, who truly were my first friends in town. I’ll never forget when I thought Shake Shack was a dance club & the city folks howled with laughter. I’ll never forget meeting a person who claimed to have never seen a cow & being like, “I’m pretty sure you passed like seven on the way here.” I’ll never forget Octavious, who was on a meth-bender & thought I was following him, the day after I had just spent three days on the couch, convinced I was in a Truman Show-type situation, & we found footing together in our paranoia.

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Starting with my premonitions of the deaths of my grandma & my uncle, I’ve been haunted by weird feelings, spawned of odd coincidences. After their deaths, every headache meant someone was brain dead, every cough meant someone was choking to death, & every moment away from a parent meant they’d never return.

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I’ve been forced to accept that paranoia is another tripwire I often fall over. A few months ago, I was watching a basketball game at a bar near the house & they started a trivia round. It was half-time & I was reading a Suzanne Buffam poem that included the alternate name of the Mona Lisa, La Gioconda; at the exact same moment, the question blared through the loud speaker, asking “What famous painting is also called La Gioconda?” This inexplicable connection ignited a “somebody’s watching me” feeling that caused me to spiral into delusion, a regular feeling I hid for many years.

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“I am forced to sleepwalk much of the time.” - John Ashbery

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Since I was about twelve, I had this hunch that my psychological make-up was a little screwy, had been bumped outta whack. Growing up in Indiana, I had well-intentioned, caring therapists who unfortunately lacked the worldview to understand what I was going through & the progressive / intellectual values I felt building up inside. When I moved to Muncie & even more so when I moved to Austin, I met well-educated & specialized mental health professionals, but they lacked the understanding of my Midwestern culture & morals, often viewing me instead as a caricature. I became a bit of a hypochondriac, though not of the I’VE GOT LUPUS & I KNOW IT sort, but of the SOMETHING’S WRONG WITH MY BRAIN kind. Sitting around a dinner table with friends recently, telling the story of how my therapist finally landed on the DID diagnosis, I realized I was a psychological / neurodiversity hypochondriac, though the medical idea of a tumor did pop up from time to time. I’d come to an appointment with SW convinced I was a psychopath, sure I had autism, believing I was touched with some new unknown malfunctioning of the mind.  I’d have my list of symptoms & my research ready, but she’d turn me away with even better counter-arguments & her solid professional opinion. Until one day, she came ready with her own idea & lists of reasons why, a connection literally life-changing, which set me on the path to better understanding my inner workings & the necessary practices to better myself, the least of which was my diagnosis with DID.


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In my early twenties, I had a hometown therapist explain thinking errors to me--fortune-telling, all-or-nothing thinking, & catastrophizing were my main charges--& more importantly, how to adjust that mindset to stay grounded & move beyond. In this new era of Tyler Gobble, post-essay & post-diagnosis, I had to recreate my motivation, my self-esteem, & my trajectory. My first tattoo was my favorite Dean Young line at the time: “We are clouds & terrible things happen in clouds.” I was 23 years old, fresh out of undergrad, out on the road for my first out-of-state poetry reading. I was also divorced, jobless, & living again with my parents. My mother asked, “Why did you have to pick a quote so sad?” I didn’t find the quote sad; it’s relieving & motivating. I’m not special & the universe doesn’t give a shit about me; now we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can move on, can move beyond.

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A big step I’ve been taking is actually find some grounding & entertainment in discomfort & unknowing, a trait I celebrate in poetry but until recently, haven’t been able to appreciate in life. The other day I had an intersection that typically would have flipped me distraught. I was having lunch, reading a Chuck Klosterman essay about Truth in interviews, when two young boys sat down at the table beside me. One said something & the other said, “You’re lying.” Then the kid who pointed out the lie began to fake interview the lying one, holding a pretend microphone up to the liar’s mouth--”How often do you lie?” “How many times a day do you lie?” “Have you ever lied to me before?” Before I would have collapsed under the interconnectedness of this experience, but this time I took my breaths, thought about the wild probability of this parallel, & chose instead to rejoice in the weirdness of this moment, the boy’s cleverness. Instead of distress, I found comfort in knowing that we, no matter the age or the situation, are often concerned with the same battles throughout our moments--truth, human connection, death, etc. It’s been a necessary revamping to live more concerned with meaning-making, the process over the product.

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In this last two years of life in Austin, I’ve been obsessed with podcasts. They fill spots of my day with the sensation of doing something productive in those moments that otherwise feel voided (driving, dishes, showering, etc.)--it’s social without having to talk, educational while allowing multi-tasking, entertaining without the sour taste of pop culture’s fakeness. When I’m feeling lonely or anxious, my favorite podcaster is there to say, “Hey. Here’s something else, something bigger than you, to ponder.” It’s probably similar to how my Mom loved watching Oprah after a long day of teaching kiddos or how my Dad loved listening to Bob & Tom goof & giggle while he drove his semi-truck down the white ribbon of death.

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Podcasts such as Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, Armchair Expert w/ Dax Shepherd, & the Bill Simmons Podcast, provided me something I never knew I needed; they were the first place I ever remember hearing two men have a genuine open conversations about art, feelings, & one’s personal history, a necessary example for me.

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As I’ve said before, my fragmentation creates a multiple-choice question type scenario for each intersecting moment, a jumbledness that often overwhelmed the self & overrode the intent of the moment. That is, till I learned an easy solution--waiting!--though sometimes it takes several of the same lessons to get it through this thick skull. On Armchair Expert, John Kim advises men to focus on responding over reacting. My friend AP articulated it as “waiting three seconds before speaking,” allowing that time to process & choose. I want my reaction to be listening-then-waiting, because as my wife said in a paper, “How someone instinctively reacts will reflect what one sees as givens in the world.”

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“I’ll say / That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.” - John Keats

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I did my fair share of reading about DID & doing the work in therapy, but I’ve still felt an urge to see more of others’ everyday living with DID. Thus, I turned to social media. To be honest, the expression I found there seems immature, leaning instead on the performative & kitschy possibilities of the disorder rather than the reintegration & state-oriented approach. The disorder took a name change from Multiple Personality Disorder to Dissociative Identity Disorder to shift the emphasis from the media-driven, fully-fledged personality to the imbalanced, unfixed states of identity formation. Things like alters having individual Instagram accounts or recording moments of “switching” seems to both further perpetuate that stereotype & keep the primary person from integrating those parts. Maybe I’m being judgemental. Maybe I’m jealous. Maybe I’m just too old, though I do appreciate many of the DID memes floating around.

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Three Favorite DID Memes:
Baby On The Highway
Honest-Ass Pie Chart
The Look Back Blur

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What is the difference between a dream & a memory? For most of my twenties, I had a recurring dream that I died on my thirtieth birthday. Jumping out of an airplane with my buddies, I say “What a way to celebrate three decades,” & out comes one of those gym-class parachutes. I blow out the 3-0 candles on my cake & it explodes in my face. Someone shoots me thirty times. This past September, I turned thirty.

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“What’s happening now can’t predict what I’ll dream tonight.” - Lyn Hejinian

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I often have dreams, both in the night & in the day, recounting dissociative spells I’ve had. I’m never quite sure if I’m retrieving those memories, rebuilding them from others’ accounts, or making them up. It’s probably some combo of the three. Anywhichaway, it’s a strange reality to have a memory of something I did, but didn’t remember, & then all of a sudden there’s a recording playing in loop in my head. My dad is a truck driver & one of my favorite parts of riding was the CB radio. On a frequency, anyone within a certain radius can speak up, listen in, & move on. There’s no solidity, no trace, no definitude. That’s kinda how my head feels.

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Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker reminds us that one is better than zero, two is better than one, when it comes to evolution, as opposed to this big leap as is often misconstrued. I’ve been learning that self-improvement, be it healing or reintegrating or learning new skills or whatever, is the same. Getting diagnosed at first felt like a slow working-backwards thing--you figure out what you have, you begin to understand what triggers it, you figure out the parameters of it, you figure out the cause of it. But I later realized those slow, steady discoveries bring unseen strides that tighten the self in important, forward-focused ways.

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It was hard, but I had to step away from teaching, in order to protect others, reevaluate my own needs, & tighten up my expectations of the lifestyle I hope to lead. It was hard, but I had to let certain folks go whose own journeys were incompatible with my own.  It was hard, but I had to admit that certain desires I hold, such as having children, are not wise ideas with my mental make-up. It was hard, but I had to accept that my reality is not the reality of many situations, instead built up of my projections, delusions, & misperceptions.

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I’ve written about this before, but one of the first observations my therapist SW noted was how I frequently live on the edge of extreme feelings, not able to stably be simply happy or sad, & certainly unfamiliar with neutral or content. What LR called “black outs,” what psychiatrists called “states,” & what my loved ones call “my spells” represent the intersection of these extremes, these animal states that overcome me. I call them thus: (D)anger, Dizzy, Lizard, Party Ghost, Sponge, Sensitive. These are the dissociative states I can fall into, in & of themselves contributors to my most prevalent dissociative symptoms like memory loss, erratic behavior, & depersonalization. It’s when the (D)anger, Dizzy, & Lizard combine that we get Vinny, my overly enthusiastic Protector. It’s when the Sponge, Sensitive, & Party Ghost overlap that we get The Kid, my grieving people-pleasing Little.

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I didn’t realize it for awhile, but Biscuits Calhoun is a kind of alter, a character based on the kind of hick men I admire, a combo of Lizard, Party Ghost, Sponge, & Sensitive, the one to unleashes the poetry & the party..I didn’t realize it at the time, but being free to explore these selves & allow the various voices to meet in my work is why I was drawn to poetry back during my freshman year of college. When LR shared her essay, it was the final permission to process out in the open. The polyvocality in my brain, the manic trips towards self-harm, an empathic struggle with over-absorption of sensory & emotional elements, local & global, it all can be reconstituted as curiosity & inspiration. A part of me finds comfort in the study of evolution, neuroscience, & birds. A part of me feels emboldened by increased political awareness. Though I’m still learning how to live with these parts integrated, writing with my disjunctive demons, angels, & gods out in the open allows me to process fully as me, whatever that might look like on a particular day.

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“How exhausting it is to be constructed / of a thousand parts--or is it several thousand?” - Timothy Donnelly

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I’m not just my disorder, I know that, but there is always the fear of losing sight of the primary self. Who is Tyler Gobble? He is a husband & a family member & a puppy dad & a friend & a teaching artist & a community member. But he’s also the organizer of this system, & through that, my main focus right now is being the one that can contain the wildness, the one able to process. I’ve realized it is not Biscuits Calhoun that writes this blog, or organizes the podcast, or reads the books, or edits Biscuits Calhoun poems. That necessary role belongs to Tyler Gobble.

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“to some / I am six foot & lizard // to others / I am considered a mange lamb / returned from the tropics” - Will Alexander

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At the end of this month, we move into my grandfather’s house, him just down the road in an assisted living facility. As my wife approached graduation from seminary, we decided to lean into a quieter, more spacious life, my wife wanting to try out the small-town country life & me stoked to return to my roots. For me, this decision has been reaffirmed by the perspective many folks have shown when hearing about this transition. My Grandpa thinks our college-educated, artsy selves are “too good for Elwood,” my mom's therapist friend worries the space & change won’t be good for my mental health, & many folks still seem misinformed, assuming meaningful art, community, & progress can only be made in big cities. Contrary to these misguided beliefs, we are a perfect match for my hometown, a place where we can work & feel seen, as well as helping others do & feel the same.

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One of the main reasons I’m moving home is to be closer to my Grandpa. I want to show gratitude to he who is left before he heads back into the ether. It feels right  to show him thanks now--for the family land, for the lessons, for the great memories & love--rather than share that appreciation as they plant him in the ground.

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It’s not fair to say, “I wish I hadn’t moved here,” though some of that wish’s retractions would poof away some major trauma & mighty heartaches for folks I love dearly, not to mention myself. But that wish also erases the monumental impact of my time here: the meeting of my wife & several other crucially influential friends, mentors, & artists, without whom I wouldn’t have gotten diagnosed, would’ve likely quit writing / art-making, & definitely would not have made the strides I’ve made in dealing with my disorder & my rougher redneck tendencies. As my time here wraps up, I’ve been reflecting on what parts of myself have solidified in Austin--my steadfast belief in cooperation (between citizens, between all creatures, with our landscape), my focus on shared well-being, & my commitment to being project / hobby-oriented.

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For the first time in my life, I care the most about being in relation to people, other creatures, & even objects in my life, rather than maintaining a predetermined form like friendship or a job. The extension into ongoing relationship, be it through hobby or art-making or simply proximity in a park, opens up a field of awareness, empathy, & curiosity that feels natural, but is often overwhelmed by societal expectation or personal hang-ups. The same vantage point can be harnessed to relieve anxiety or embarrassment from my journey with my states, alters & symptoms flowering out my particular strand of DID. It’s about showing up, it’s about keeping on, it’s about setting each up to be their best selves, it’s about collaboration, it’s about the on-going expansive list of living.

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I’m so thankful that I had the experience of organizing a monthly performance series (Everything Is Bigger), learning how to balance the needs of a community with my own selfish & stoked desires. I’m so thankful that I had the experience of working at Down Home Ranch & with VSA Texas, learning how to approach disability & neurodiversity from an angle of camaraderie. I’m so thankful that I had to experience the insanity of big city traffic navigation on a daily basis, learning to better appreciate the gridded system of open backroads & quiet streets of my hometown. I’m so thankful that I had the experience of doing Shitty Band with MT, learning how to better collaborate with a close friend & how to be vulnerable as an adult learning a new skill. I’m so thankful that I had the experience of volunteering with Meals On Wheels, learning about the power of simply showing up for the elderly. I’m so thankful that I had the experience of attending this city’s meetings & marches for organizations like Black Lives Matter, learning more effective ways to be an ally. I’m so thankful that I had the experience of being in a more vibrant LGBTQ+ community, learning more about my own sexuality & gender identity, as well as how to better support other LGBTQ+ folks. I’m so thankful for the experience of Sunday date nights with Diana, learning to discuss how we fit into our community, what we want out of a home, & how we might head towards that imagined future.

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“eternity looms / in the corner like a home invader saying don’t mind me I’m just here to watch you nap.” - Kaveh Akbar