Anthony Bourdain, Autism, ADHD and the Darkness
“Roadrunner,” the Anthony Bourdain documentary, got my brain and body buzzing. My latest self-healing practice, and one we share with our families, has been to feel explicitly and expressively acknowledge the physical sensations of emotions in the body as they arise.
The spirit is willing. The flesh is weak. The walls are strong. The c-PTSD is real.
Walls to keep people and emotions at bay. A dysfunctional fortification, despite our most fervent desires and secret intentions. The world is not set up for an individual to impose their will.
An early scene shows Anthony Bourdain as he places an order for the next day with a purveyor. Sitting on the floor, long, skinny legs outstretched, lit cigarette, cell phone, reading his list into the business’s voicemail. The next morning, when he’s waiting, pacing on the sidewalk for the delivery, again smoking, he is irritated that they are late. “This is why chefs are always drunks,” he bemoans, “because they do not understand why the world doesn’t run like a kitchen.”
Why can’t the world be in restaurant order — mise-en-place, a certain number of reservations, a set menu?
The cast, friends, and family interviewed for the movie noted that he was a geeky, nerdy guy. When he got really into something, he became obsessed — music, film, jujitsu, a person.
A precocious reader, consummate storyteller, ex-junkie who literally became famous overnight. The couple he worked with on the first show, shot in Japan, stated that you couldn’t get him to make eye contact with anybody and that he was awkward, a romantic wanting a “normal” life. He was blessed with curiosity, yet too on the go to really settle down. That was not the life for him. And he was lonely, and felt alone. That empty feeling was unshakeable.
Some of Bourdain’s characteristics remind me of autism and the ADHD that commonly co-occurs. Intensity and laser-focus around special interests. Driven by a motor to keep moving. Struggle to sustain relationships, despite best efforts.
Also, depression and anxiety.
I cried at the end. I noticed how I tried to hold back, I noticed the constriction in my chest, my held breath, the tears leak out. I recognized the mixed emotions of those whom he left behind — artists, friends, filmmakers, family. They were angry, hurt, guilty, so sad, grief-stricken. It is clear that this wound of loss will not ever really heal in them. Mixed emotions are a tangled rope.
Bourdain hung himself one night in his hotel room. The toxicology report was clean.
He took his own life, leaving no note, seemingly on impulse. Although he had made mention of killing himself often in passing.
Passing.
Those who struggle socially for whatever reason — autism and its attendant mental health impositions, for example — are nine times more likely to succeed at suicide than those who are not autistic.
To be seen, to be well-known and still loved, as an imperfect human, full of flaws — this intimacy, or “in-to-me-see” — offers strong protection from being undermined by the deep darkness that makes you want to die at your own hands. Having never personally known someone who died by suicide, I can only vividly imagine that the suffering in those left behind is irreparable.
Suicide is sovereign, right? Your body, your choice. Right?
This rugged and exclusive “cult of individualism,” to quote sidereal astrologer Dayna Lynn Nuckols (@peoplesoracle) has ensured the spread of settler-colonialism throughout the world. It is a trap, and it is a lie. What affects you, affects me, affects everyone, always. Minute by minute we are subjected to the law of cause and effect. We are not separate; we have never been. We cannot be if we want to survive. This is (r)evolution.
We are all suffering from COVID. We are all suffering from disconnection. These are the conditions we have been given. Our connection is not only absolute, it is necessary — to move us through this time into one more collaborative and supportive and kind. We need to feel ourselves, first, and then we need to feel each other.
You feel me?
You feel you?
You feel US?
"Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."