I Still Don't Want to Drink

I've probably never been quite as equipped with excuses to dump a few liters of liquor down my hair covered face. 

Radiating waves of some of the most intense and foreign pain roll in and roll out.  It's grief.  I hate grief... it's never easy when things we hold close to ourselves die, even if those things were unhealthy, even if you could see it coming.  There's just no way a person can be prepared... I've watched people in my family die who I thought would live forever, I've watched relationships die that I thought would live forever.  Cognitively, of course I know there's not guarantee of permanence in any of this, in fact quite the opposite is true.  What I do, sometimes stupidly allow, is the starry eyed belief that maybe it will be different, maybe I can approach the relationship with the belief that it's permanent.  Losing someone is horrifying, helpless doesn't really begin to describe what a person feels like when someone slips away.  The writing is on the wall, and I just keep staring at the floor.  It's just incredible how denial can work so well.  Sometimes I'm grateful for it, sometimes I'm resentful.  My brain doesn't seem to know the difference between productive healing pain and unhealthy misery, laden with self abuse and hate.  All my brain knows is, "Pain effing blows... get it outta here."  So, in my life, I've allowed unhealthy things to continue far too long and I've intentionally put off soaking through healing grief because I didn't want to feel it.  Both are bad, both can be avoided with a diligent awareness (an awareness I only seem to possess when I don't need it).  Denial isn't always bad, it exists for a good reason... but when I don't keep an eye on it I actually set myself up for more pain than I would have otherwise.

Anyways... I'm obviously struggling with a lot of personal issues that remain unresolved.  When it's appropriate for me to talk about them in a forum like this I will, until then... maybe don't be so effing nosy? Mmmmk?  The point of this post is to take a minute and look inward at the best things about me right now and I encourage any of you to do that same... that means everyone, even you.  For me, I've struggled a lot with personal identity, for most of my adult life I've completely denied myself a voice and defined myself by what I'm doing, who I'm in love with, where I work, what I'm doing academically.  I don't think I'm alone here... head over to an in laws Christmas and think about answering the question, "So what are you doing? How have you been?"  You're likely going to list off your annual resume with a handful of embellishments and positive spins.  You're not going to say much of anything about your own personal growth or the things you can really feel good about independent of what you happen to be doing.  "Yeah, Janet... I've been in therapy all year and I've never felt more self-actualized."  She would have spit in my face and denied me scalloped corn.  Which is why I talked about my internship, my job, my mother's health... etc. (I really did like her scalloped corn).  The problem with being so caught up in defining myself by external things is, well, they're all gone.  So, I'm left with this sense of being noone, when these things that are so much a part of how I define myself fall away... just who in the hell am I? 

I'm 31 and I'm certainly not where I thought I would be... face it haters, I'm talented.  I was pretty sure I was already going to have been published and be working on my 3rd or 4th million dollars.  As it stands, I'm living with my second set of parents, I lost my job due to a psychiatric hospitalization, I've been arrested 7 times for alcohol related offenses and I'm headed to jail for a yet to be determined amount of time... so, my PhD is going to have to wait, again.  There's a resume for you... drop that one on Janet at the stupid effing white elephant, yankee swap, Christmas extravaganza. 

I am responsible for all of these things, for all of these losses and pain.  These are things I've done and I will do nothing short of standing up admitting my wrong and accepting the consequences.  Whenever I emerge from this tunnel I have build myself that I am now crawling through I want to be able to turn around and look at where I was and say, "Tyler, you handled that as well as you possibly could have."  I don't want to look back and feel like I have wasted that time or sat alone in a dark room and felt sorry for myself.  Because, that facts are... all this fallout is a result of a bomb that I dropped.  The consequences have been many and there are more still to come, I can choose to be a cry baby bitch about it or I can choose to accept them as my reality and be accountable and present, nothing I do can change their inevitability.  So why not get my best Victor Frankl on and find some meaning inside this seemingly meaningless period in my life?

If there ever were a time when people would maybe, not only expect me to be in a bathtub full of Scotch, but perhaps even understand it, it's now.  There is nothing inside of me that is driven to numb out this experience.  There has never been a greater opportunity for growth in my life.  I am going to enter a jail holding on to nothing except all of the things that make me who I am.  I will have nothing to lean on, no crutches, no external hopes... nothing to distract me from the reality of the experience.  It's going to be awful, it has been awful for months already, but I don't want to miss it.  I need to feel this, I need to feel all of it.  As awful as it's going to be, in a lot of ways it will be a chance to wave goodbye to the fumbling disaster my life has been for 5 years and be reborn to a life full of new hopes, new people and new opportunities.

I am not what I've done.  I am not what I'm doing.  I am not what my intentions are.  I am not those fancy papers that I hang on my wall.  I am a man who loves.  I am smart.  I am deep.  I'm funny and infectious (in a good way, not like herpes).  I'm a lot of things that, when I take the time to look at, I really really like.  These are only a few of the things that make me who I am, there are hundreds of thousands of things like this that live within all of us.  No matter what happens... these are things I can always pick up and take with me where ever I may go.  They are permanent, they are me.  Who are you?