To Burn The Bridge Or Not

Thomas Wolfe said "you can never go home again".  That was an astute observation at the time.

Someone else observed 'Men tend to remember themselves greater than they were'.  Perhaps not as catchy or as astute.  Certainly not as freely embraced regardless of truth.  

I am the observer.  I keep that in mind as a challenge to not embellish these stories of my life.  Integrity is important.  I know that some of these memories that are shared experiences are remembered differently than how I tell it.  I don't believe that takes away from the veracity of what I write.  It matters because these stories are part of my identity. 

Some of my stories have grave implications.  Lives will be profoundly affected if or when they are shared.  I have considered waiting till these people have passed on before sharing these stories but that seems sort of like a cheap and cowardly shot in the back.  

I have thought about simply not sharing these stories.  Maybe.  I don't know yet, but there seems to be some cowardice in that too.  It's not an easy decision.  What good will come from bringing these things to the surface?  Perhaps none.  I don't know.  But telling these hard stories are the point of this blog and I want to tell the whole story.  

I feel certain that if the stories in question are told it will destroy more than one precious and sacred relationship.  For me there will be greater depth and meaning to "You can never go home".  Two men who see themselves greater than they are will be disgraced.  These stories seem to be plugging up the works.  I find it difficult to continue writing until I get past these stories.

What About Love

I make an earnest effort to improve myself; in word, thought and deed, and in my relationships.  I try to maintain this improvement continuously;  learning is a fundamental component of any positive change or growth.  I strive to always be open to new opportunities to learn.  Most especially from those closest to me.

Love, like identity is an ever present thought in my mind.  I would like to think I have learned something about love.  I have had many ideas about what love is, beliefs about what love could do.  There are songs, movies, books, and poems about love.  But ultimately, its all just a bunch of words.

In my mind, love was a bond holding two people together; making holding on through all the storms of life worth it.  Love was unconditional acceptance, unbridled desire to remain linked to the other, an emotional need for the others well being that surpassed selfishness.  Love was the strength to endure what ever may come.

Love might save a relationship, someone else's relationship.  There is no universal love.  Love is an emotion, but that emotion is whimsical at best.  Love is an idea.  It can be and attitude, an action, a motivation, a goal, but it is, and will always be an elusive ethereal idea.  That is it.

There is no divine love.  If you have love between you and another living thing, you might find something close to divinity.  In a few rare moments I have known such love.  Those moments were fleeting.

Mostly love is a lie.  A fallacy.  Even if it does not start out that way, invariably it ends up that way.  

I have spent the majority of my life's energy seeking loving, trying to cultivate love, trying to be loveable.  Yet I have had no firm concept of what love is, or how to nurture it.  I have sought understanding from those around me.  I have tried to love those around me in such a way as to inspire such great love and devotion that they would love me completely and unwaveringly.  But they are human.  I am human. Perhaps I am less human.  I have failed.

I have failed to endure, and thus failed to love enough.  I have no faith.  I have precious little hope.

Violence

Are you okay?

That's a strange question isn't it?

How do you answer a question like that?  Do you tell the truth.  Even if it is awkward or uncomfortable?  Do you fake it?  And what exactly is okay?  Okay compared to what?

All of my life if I wasn't bleeding or dying I thought that the answer had to be yes.

I don't think that way any more.

And really, I don't know if I can really say that the answer to that question has ever been yes since the passing of my mother.

Right now, I am not okay.

I am broken and wounded.  I came unraveled and haven't gotten myself sorted yet.

My son is a passionate and intense young man.  He is thoughtful and sensitive.  He also has a temper.  When he was a toddler he would have outbursts of anger and would say things he believed would be hurtful.

I explained to him that when we use word to hurt people, it's like punching them in the face, only with words instead of our hand.  I don't believe it is oversimplifying at all to say that we can punch people in the face with words.  Sometimes it is with the words we say.  Sometimes it is with words we don't say.

I am really tired of being punched in the face.  I am really tired of taking shit from people.  My mother took shit from people.  She also had an explosive temper.  Just like my son.  Just like me.

I had a violent childhood.  That scared, bullied kid is still here.  Violence was so much a part of my life that I eventually became violent.  I used violence to stop violence.  Sometimes I was just violent.

Answering Why

Abused and orphaned as a young child, I spend a lot of energy pondering the question of identity.  But equally important is the question "Why am I the way that I am?".

For much of my teenage years I was driven by spite.  Everything was experienced through a filter of hurt, anger and jealousy.  Over time the hurt slides into numbness.  Anger alienates and becomes irrelevant.  Jealousy doesn't go away so easily.  Jealousy easily masks itself as any number of seemingly justifiable biases.

For decades I had no idea that I was jealous.  Jealousy like any negative emotion, will grow like cancer.  In my case I have found that an inability to recognize and address that jealousy has prevented me from healing and overcoming nearly every wound I have ever suffered.  Part of my survival has been to mask wounds and to redirect anger.  In a sense, I had to lie to myself about what I was feeling or why so that I could cope and get through each day.  As an adult, trying to untangle this mess has been a monumental feat.

Working through my emotions, finding healing and moving forward has meant that I have had to confront, and in many cases relive the trauma I have been put through.  Sexual assaults; the death of my mother; being ostrecised from my church community; being abandoned repeatedly by my father; physical abuse and witnessing my siblings be abused and assaulted. There is so much guilt and shame in all of it.

Everything that happened, all that remains is what is in my head.  No one else cares.  It doesn't matter to anyone else.  What haunts my head, the only evidence of it that remains is words.  All my emotions and mental filters, those are just more words.  What use are words that no one is willing to read or hear?

At one point I thought religion had saved me.  I thought god had taken it all away.  But the emotions and mental filters were still there.  The 'scars' are still there.  Religion is just more words.  Scripture, god, just words.  All of it is empty and meaningless.  I am sincerely happy for all who find healing and comfort in god or religion but I am equally perplexed.

The wounds wont ever be undone.  They are part of me.  This is an essential understanding to moving forward. 

Being heard was the foundation on which healing has really, truly begun.  Having someone to listen to everything I felt like I needed to say, who would not judge, minimize or excuse anything was absolutely critical.  Being heard is humanizing.  After being dehumanized, it is such a wonderful gift to be humanized.  Simply listening to what another person wants to tell you can be one of the most compassionate things we will ever do.

Few people can really stomach hearing me tell my story.  I am fortunate that I am finally at a place in my life that I have people around me who will listen to me, and even if they can not understand will not lose patience with me.  They are encouraging and supportive.  They will endure the discomfort of listening to me.

I am beginning to be able to let go of guilt and shame for things I had no control over.  It makes it easier for me to accept responsibility for the things I am responsible for and change.

I was the way I was because of what happened to me.  I am the way I am now because I have begun to find healing and I am able to have some control of myself and my life.

...Best Avoided

My past is part of who I am, in much the same way that my limbs are part of me, but much more like a limb that is missing.  It is part of my identity like my name and lineage.  But it is something that has always been hidden or camouflaged.  It is uncouth to talk about.   I talk about it and it makes people terribly uncomfortable.

My past is a wound.  My past is partially resolved at best.  I have wrestled and struggled with past my whole life.  I struggle with anger and rage.  I make people terribly uncomfortable.

Despite my best efforts, I have not ever had many friends, and those friends don't get very close.  The more people get to know me, the more they tend to become distant till there is no connection.  I have been told countless times that I am too intense.

Part of my struggle with identity is the result of rejecting the identity that I feel, the identity that others have given me or projected onto me.  I have come to a point in which I will not allow anyone else to determine my identity.  What I believe or know is often in conflict with what I feel.  Sometimes what I feel overpowers what I know or believe.  Others have wounded me, they altered what I believe about myself.  I have wounded myself.  I have done wrong, done bad things to good people.  Forgiveness is hard.  Forgiving myself is hardest.

What do I do with this other part of myself?  I am the child that was not wanted.  I am a scared little boy who has not completely gotten over the loss of my mother or being abandoned by my father.  I am the child that was sexually assaulted over and over.  I am the bed wetter.  I am the kid that all the others laughed at.  I am the kid that was beaten and humiliated.  Is it possible to stop being these things.  These things can not ever be undone.  I do not ever stop feeling these things, remembering these things, reliving these things.  These wounds keep getting reopened.  How do I move past this?

My first spouse started cheating on me three months into the marriage.  My second spouse was unable and unwilling to accept me, love me, or value me.  I only ever disappointed her.  My children either can not or will not forgive me for ending that marriage. 

For the last four years I have not been able to hold a job for more than four months.

There is a pattern here and I am the common denominator.  Logic insists there is something wrong with me.

I have not claimed innocence or perfection.  But I don't know how to fix myself.  I don't know where to find the answers.

There is not much anyone can do for me.  There are not many interested in trying.  Me, my story, are things best avoided.

Signs

Humans have looked for meaning and signs to guide them on their paths for ions.  I suspect this is more true in the abstract sense than in the literal.  Long before men had created any place to go they were wandering the planet, trying to derive meaning from the world around them.

My mother was a devout Christian.  It made a huge formative impression on me and even though I have lost my faith in orthodox Christian belief twice there has always been an unrelenting need for me to find meaning.  I have looked, studied, analyzed, searched, dug, and reached for meaning where ever I might find it.  I have studied multiple religions.  I still search for meaning.

And at this point you can laugh if you want too.  You can think what you will but somewhere, somehow I began to fixate on the number 3, triangles and pyramids.  They have become path markers in the same way road signs have.  I have numerous examples to more than adequately justify my trust in this.  I do not know of 3 being a reliable marker to anyone.  I am okay with that.

At key points in my life something 3 sided, something common, suddenly jumps out at me.  Most commonly it is stones.  As a child with no toys, rocks and dirt were always my 'go-to' entertainment.

Yesterday I found a three sided stone next to a tree.  It was a good shade tree under a sun that was quickly becoming blisteringly bright and hot.  I was traveling on my bicycle, I had just set out from where I was, and my rear tire went flat.  This shade tree was a bit of an oasis.  The stone jumped out at me.

Like all abstract signs applied to a practical world there is much to be gained or lost in the interpretation and application.  I am gifted with friends whose light of wisdom shines brightest in their understanding of the abstract.  This is good for me, I am good and recognizing signs but not always the best at interpreting the signs.

Yesterday all my plans and hopes for coming out of the valley that I am trying to climb out of came unraveled.

With help I understand that the sign is not confirming that I made a right or wrong decision, it is a reminder to keep moving.  To not quit.  Do not give up.  

Oh Joy

Joy was the mother of my sisters friend.

Joy seemed like a sane, normal person.  A good person.  She was a single mother of three and seemed to have a reasonably happy family.  When my dad and Joy got together, it seemed to me that we would maybe become a reasonably normal, happy family too.

I was so very wrong.

It was just a few short months ago that Dawn had broke her hand on my face.  Joy liked me in the beginning.  My dad could be found most of the time, though he still didn't come home to our house.  My brother and sister and I were together again.  Everyone was reasonably happy on the surface.  It seemed like things were improving.  In hind sight it was a brief pause in the grand finale that would be the end of my family.

Connie and her friend introduced Joy and my dad shortly after the start of school year.  By mid fall we were all floating back and forth between our house and Joy's apartment, just a few blocks away.  We were all together for Thanksgiving and it was the first whole family holiday since my mom had passed.

Christmas came and for the first time since the onset of my mother's illness I felt genuine excitement and anticipation for Christmas beyond hope for a present.  I felt sort of normal for the first time in a long time.

Christmas morning there were many presents under the tree, more than I had personally ever seen under a tree that I had a connection to.  It was wonderful.  But as the presents were unwrapped is was evident that there was a bit of a let-down for me.  They were not bad presents.  I wasn't rude.  It's just that I had outgrown an interest in the things that had been given to me.  I made an effort to be polite but it was clear.  As I remember it, I was not the only one who was not adequately overjoyed with the presents because Joy lost her shit.  It started with snide remarks but quickly escalated to full on yelling.  Then screaming back and forth from various people besides joy.  Then the Christmas tree took flight across the room, smashing into the window.  Play time was apparently over.

Joy's eruptions had occurred, but not ever anything like that.  Like so many other situations, this became the new normal.  My father was not one to let a train wreck get in the way of romance and in a short time we had moved into a house together.  We moved again a few months later a few blocks over and then other members of her family and their friends all moved in with us.  Then some time later her ex husband  moved in with us.

There were many traumatic events in this house that stay with me to this day.  On this occasion the youngest of her two sons was jealous of me for stealing his older brothers attention.  I had irked Joy and like an old familiar tune, that boy played his mother.  Among the many atrocities he lamented was smoking.  I was just about to turn 11 years old.  I had lit a cigarette once, puffed, choked and put it out.  It happened long before any of them had come around but I had told the brother about it.  According to them I was stealing them from the gas station and smoking about a pack a day.  Also, according to their story, I was harassing them to join me in smoking.

I was summoned to the living room where everyone sat staring at me.  I learned of the accusations as I learned of my conviction.  My punishment was that I was to smoke a pack of cigars.  I tried to smoke one but couldn't.  So then I had to eat them.  The whole pack.  Then I had to eat a pack of cigarettes.  I got sick.  It took two days to recover.

Joy and my dad were having problems.  He was the only adult in the house working.  One day we came home to find that Joy had left.  I was overjoyed.  My dad was crushed.  I thought everything would be okay.  But then my brother stopped coming home.  Connie had gone to my grandmother's.  It was just me and my dad.  But mentally he was in another universe.  About a week later I came home mid afternoon and everything that had been in the house was now in the front yard.  Everything.  The Pinto was loaded to maximum capacity.  There was only enough room for my dad and I to get in.  When my dad saw me he told me to go into the house and get anything that I wanted to take.  Anything left would be gone forever.  We were leaving and not coming back.

My father told me that we were moving to my grandmother's house.  When we arrived at my grandmother's house he told me to go ahead and go in, he was going to go get the car looked at and would be back later.

I rang the doorbell and greeted my surprised grandmother.  She was happy to see me but wasn't expecting me.  She asked what I was doing there, where was my dad?  As I answered here question I could see her face fall but didn't understand.

It took months for me to accept the truth.

It would be five years before I saw my father again.