Day 47 A Refusal of Wholeness

I’m kind of spent this week.  I’m not sure what it is.  I’ve had a headache that started in June and it wreaks havoc every once in a while.  Really torments me.  When the worst of it subsides it stays at a level 2 or 3 but my body gets worn out.  Coupled with the therapy I’m doing, the work I’m doing with my sponsor, staying clean, and going to work I’m fatigued to the bone.  Writing these blogs takes a toll too.  I feel like I’m stuck at 13 again and I wonder why.  I fall back into the “what do I want to do with my life” zone.  At 59 it seems like most people would have pretty much wound up what they’ve done and now are ready to simply enjoy the golden years.  I seriously don’t think I have that much time left so I’d like the remaining time to count in some enriching way.  My resting heart beat is around 90 so I’ve pretty much gone through most of my allotted beats.  I’m learning about the soul, my soul though.  It’s sensitive, wielding, generous but needy to a degree.  It has the capacity to love, to care, to be tender and when to be tough.  It can protect with ferocity but it can also shroud itself inside heavy wings of shelter from the pain of life.  And life is pain for me.

It is all about me.  I know that sounds superficial but that’s the lay of the land folks.  At some point in my history, a switch was turned on that demanded everybody to like me.  Really it was everyone to love me but I would settle for like. Can you imagine the difficulty living with that responsibility?  The many different faces I’ve had to endure, to capture, to meld just to find that delicate balance?  It was okay, no, it was not okay that my mother didn’t like me.  I liked to think I didn’t care.  What I didn’t understand was why she didn’t like me?  I couldn’t understand the fairness, the gravitational defying unfairness of that lack.  True I didn’t ask to be born and I hoped I didn’t ask to be born with her as my mom but then what did I do that was so bad to be treated so cruelly?  What mother treats her child like thrift shop furniture?  How can you wield a weapon against your child?  When Ry was 5 or 6 I imagined doing that as an experiment (in my mind only) and I realized I would have to be bat shit crazy to go off on my son like that.  There was no way I could bear a weapon upon my son’s body, no fucking way.  With that partial evidence I was now convinced that my mom was truly a crazy person driven to extremes beyond her control.  But somehow that didn’t alleviate the wanderlust of being my own person.  It didn’t let Chris be Chris.  Decades of programming didn’t suddenly disappear and I was introduced again to the world born again.  No that’s not what happened.

What did happen?  At some point I did go bat shit crazy.  I was completely untethered from any human programming, set adrift on the seas of doubt, fear, insecurity and “togetherness.”  My second marriage exploded and the emotional damage cut deep into a decade of work that I thought I was doing well with.  I was clean and sober, seeing a therapist on occasion.  Raising 2 kids, working, helping with all the work around the house.  I didn’t make delineations between household chores.  I was coaching a girls’ soccer team and I had no idea how the game was played.  If the ball wasn’t moving I could actually kick it.  But, but, but, I thought I had it together.  What I realized manically out of all of that was how close to unreality my mind resides.  My soul was residing outside of myself.  I didn’t know better.  I was projecting happiness outside of myself on how non-reactive everything was.  I was liked by my wife and kids.  I thought that was all I needed.  I never discovered the depth of the need for inner peace for my psyche. I didn’t know that I was a good guy where it counted.  For lack of a better technical term, my heart.  I performed all the actions to please my external environment but for some reason, it was not coinciding with what my soul required.  I was not being true to myself.

Maybe it wasn’t a great marriage.  We were both trying to suck the essence of peace from each other’s projections.  It didn’t matter who did the laundry or who didn’t ever wash one piece of mine. (A little slam)  It wasn’t the actions that made it bad, it was the hearts being elsewhere.  Hell, what are second marriages other than trying to make right what went so wrong in the first.  Sure there are comparisons, good and bad and that’s where the damage starts.  If she said something in the same tone as my first, it would bring up a memory that didn’t belong but that was now contaminating today.  Coupled with some similar actions and now it’s an event.  If you’re used to someone not washing spoons right for 20 fucking years and then husband #2 missed one spoon, guess what?  I’m just simplifying here.  This was only a microcosm of what went on with my marriage.  I just stopped making her heart beat faster one day.  She was looking for a spiritual answer and I couldn’t meet the challenge.  Who could?  Then it turned into her being my mom.  I started to compare and my heart went a little grey.  Well who wants to have a heart that color with the woman of your dreams?

I fell apart in one day.  I’m not going to go into the specifics but there was evidence of someone else.  I wanted to kick some serious ass, twice, but that wasn’t the real issue.  My angel, my direct line to the God lacking side of me was gone.  I didn’t have wholeness and I didn’t know that was where the pain was truly coming from.  If my heart/soul/psyche was whole, if I was ok with myself whoever I was, I could have managed the disappointment.  I could have written a country song or something else.  I could have let go with wisdom, yeah some disappointment and sadness, but I didn’t.  I lost my entire mind.  All the pain that the world had inflicted on me in the past was now front and present again and much more tangible.  I deserved this.  This world is pain.  I was a bad kid.  What was I thinking I could be happy?  Another woman abandoning me was my fate and fuck me for thinking it could ever be different.  FUCK ME.  It never changes.  All that work was just a thin veneer of wishing against the torrential winds of my destiny.

I started closing my eyes on the freeway on the way to work and see how far I could count.  I started dreaming of death in so many ways.  I had my son to think about and it was hard for me to know what damage I would unleash on him with my death.  My mind was shutting down because the pain was too great.  I could only handle very small streams of reality because the misery would fill it up immediately, perversely.  If I opened up more, it filled those rooms just as fast as they appeared.  I had to close it down and I felt that total closure would resolve that dilemma.  That feeling was coming from the limited space I physically allowed myself to work with.  I was without wholeness of mind truly.  I didn’t have a pier to dock my boat too metaphorically.  I didn’t know how to start again, how to climb out of that hell deep hole of black.

Then I met Nicole.

1.        I’m grateful that I’m learning it is more than me now.

2.       I’m grateful that the pain I’ve felt has been my greatest teacher.

3.       I’m grateful that I’m single today and getting to know the greatest guy ever.