The last few weeks have been dangerous and stupid, utterly dissociated and full of hopeful flailing. I have not been true to myself. I have not been true to others. I have shied away from friends and filled my head with static in the hopes of creating something soft out of glass fragments.
This morning I came back from wherever I was.
Today is day one.
Love to all. Even you, whoever you were.
In flaws there are weapons. In tears, panic. In grace, sadness.
I have cried more over the last week than I have in a long time.
It doesn’t hit me. It just happens.
I realize just how unbelievably affected I am by everything that has happened to me.
I was married for 16 years. I was not the easiest person to live with. But I changed what I could and until recently, I received all kinds of feedback about how much I DID improve. I thought that, PTSD and ADHD aside (or WITH, in the case of the latter) that I was a happy-at-the-core person. It wasn’t my base personality that needed changing, it was my temper and my fear, the PTSD stuff that would constantly insert itself into my family life.
The more I think about it, the more I learned direct-from-the-source, the more I know it was a lost cause. I am exceptionally sensitive to subtext. In the last few years, I was asked over and over to take medication to treat my problems, even though I was reacting to a subtextual situation that was real, ongoing, and so much worse than I ever imagined.
The subtext was overwhelming. Truth was mist. I was my own worst enemy, because I am a reactor.
I was part of a goddamn puppet theater.
If I could do things over again, there are many things I would change. But the sadness comes from knowing that there’s nothing I could have done. I wasn’t well-liked for many years, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why it was more important to dislike me than to be responsible. I don’t understand, and now I have no pets.
Sometimes the sadness is that simple.
With my father, there have been one or two flashes where he nearly broke the sociopathic encasement… but he quickly retreated into lockdown. In my marriage, there were more than a couple of flashes of equal personal responsibility, but they vanished quickly. Therapy terminated. Only I remained.
I will not allow myself to be the sole consistently-responsible-for-one’s-own-behavior party. I would rather die than be in that situation again. It almost killed me twice. This is not hyperbole.
I am watching things change so quickly.
I have been told by parents, spouses, children that I am a fraud. A liar. I don’t know the causal factors behind some of these accusations. But I disagree. The love I feel for people is real and genuine and ongoing.
It happened again. That last sentence made me cry.
I have new people in my life who I feel like I’ve known forever, new friends who I have come to love dearly, and the patterns of family forming up on the horizon. There is a reason I’m still walking this earth.
I accept that other people can be desperate and flailing and will do anything not to look in the mirror. And that this desperation expands like radio waves, disconnecting everything it touches from the point of it all. That people can be smart and wonderful and still descend into this sociopathic muck and that there is zero chance of return.
I accept this. But I miss my pets.
Love to all. Even you.
Love does not have to be extraordinary. Moreover, love shouldn’t be extraordinary, at least not most of the time. Love should consist of neutral tones in both color and sound. Nearly boring, and definitely commonplace.
Love should be something we aren’t surprised to feel.
There’s more, of course. Love that’s bigger, deeper, expansive and bright. It’s something I keep thinking I understand until it sneaks up on me and blows the doors off my prior perceptions.
Love keeps knocking me on my ass.
The rare purity of this kind of love is, I think, only possible when I am feeling the mid-tone sine wave of the day-to-day.
There’s a reason I’ve been signing my posts the same way since 2005. There’s a reason I have “even you” tattooed on my arm.
There’s a reason I love you.
Love to all. Even you.
I am a coward, but it’s cool. I’m working on it.
It’s intellectually smug and satisfying for me to say that perfection doest exist. It’s also very cowardly, because it’s a lie. Perfect exists, bound by threads of flaw. Perfect isn’t complicated. It’s something comfortable and easy, quiet and soothing. Perfect is the instant transfer of just what this is, initiated by eye contact.
“Simply perfect,” she said. And she’s right. All kinds of right.
Love to all. Even you, fellow cowards.
It’s hard to sit still, because it makes me start thinking. And when I start thinking, I forget right now.
My father didn’t talk to his mother for a long time. Years. His brother? Decades. Me, for 9 years now. My oldest son has decided to stop speaking to me. For my birthday, he told me to go fuck myself. He thinks I made his life miserable. I don’t think that’s true. He’s a teenager. Maybe he’ll come around. But maybe not.
In the now, I can accept letting him go.
When my father stopped speaking to his mother, he had my brother and I do the same. My mother said it would be a “betrayal” if we spoke to anyone he didn’t. I broke that mold at age 23, when I called my Uncle and said “I don’t know what the hell is going on. But hi.” I love my Uncle dearly.
My father convinced people exceptionally important to me to cast me out. My brother, my godparents. More.
Now, the family I created has crumbled. Divorcing, losing the battle to the well-funded suite of attorneys my ex has at her disposal, I am actually indigent according to the courts, and unable to get a job that would pay what my ex-wife convinced the Supreme Court (in my absence) that I am making, or will be.
I am not flailing. Not yet. I have moments of Dive, but I don’t.
I have to focus on now. Only now.
With unexpected comfort, I fell in love again. Not just madly in love, which I am, but in a long-term, companionate way which seems like a not-so-minor spiritual miracle. I have never met someone so capable and engaged. And it happened nearly by accident, through an intelligent serendipity.
Only now, I can feel how solid the ground is under my feet.
I am not reinventing myself. I am becoming truer and truer to who I have always been. To the person I was before I became enmeshed in years of subtext.
Of silent events I could only sense, revealed years later.
Dipping myself in the sociopathic muck of days gone by serves only to occupy my head with noise and useless matter, clouding my heart from the joy of now.
And damn, if I haven’t started radiating again.
I have to keep in the now. Only now.
Love to all. Even you, the kid who keeps taking the other kid’s phone.
Happy birthday to me.
After months of separation, years of oh-that’s-why-pseudo-separation, a lovely-but-doomed friendship, and a lot of figurative truth-screaming from the mountaintops, I woke up this morning at four AM and realized the weirdest thing.
I really am giving up.
When I got sober, I had to give up the idea that I can drink normally. It’s not a moral issue, the chemical thing, but I can’t do it. Now, I’ve had to give up the idea that I can “win” ethical or moral arguments with the truth, or at least… what I believe the truth to be.
In the A&P a few days ago, the cashier and her manager were loudly discussing what to do about the fact that I gave my Coinstar voucher AFTER the items were rung up. They kept bringing in higher-ranked people to loudly ask me if I HAD ANY MONEY.”
I finally yelled – and I mean in theater conversational yell: ”No! I do not have any money! But since you’re announcing this so loudly, could you also see if you have any EXTRA SMALL CONDOMS in the back for me? I’m out.”
The manager laughed, and said “You’re a comedian, huh?” He was being genuinely friendly. The lady behind me in line snorfled. I said “Hey, this lady likes the condom joke, that’s a good thing.” And…And… She looked at my, eyes alight, and said conspiratorially:
“I HAVE TO.”
Holy shit. She outed her husband for having a tiny wee-wee, and completely made my day. That was amazing. Because she wasn’t being mean. I swear to God. You had to see it on her face. She’s just accepted her situation and, I guess, adapted.
The POINT here is that I give up. I’m not engaging my oldest to prove that I’m on equal footing with my ex. It angers him and will never, ever work. I can’t “win.”
I give up trying to make lawyers see lying is wrong. I’m just going to prove myself right… only to the point where I get divorced without getting screwed.
I give up being anything but on the planet (for as long as I’m allowed), being true to myself, not drinking, and being as present as possible for the people I love.
As possible. That’s the key thing here.
In two hours, I meet with two lawyers. One of them believes I’m delusional. She thinks I believe I am Elmo. I am not making this up. They are suing me to pay for the privilege of meeting with them to get this divorce on track.
So here I go. Happy birthday to me.
43 years old, starting over but having everything.
Love to all. Even you, thriver.
p.s. Championable went offline, I’m restoring posts. Sorry.
Recent Comments