Thursday, February 3, 2011

Day 174

I'm not sure what this horrifying funk is that's happening to me right now, but for the first time since it started I legitimately feel like I'm on my way to where ever I'm going.  I don't like it, not at all, I'm heartbroken, I'm afraid, I'm ashamed, I feel alone, abandoned and I'm largely unreachable.  There isn't a single person in the world that can give me what I need except for me.  There is happiness in my life but only when I unplug myself from all of the things that hurt so much.  The amplitude and length of these waves of pain are the likes of which I have never seen nor experienced before.  What I was feeling was helpless, because there was a source of my pain that I felt was unnecessary.  Now that I've resigned to that helplessness I can see it with a new perspective.  I've literally done every single possible thing I could do... and it just didn't matter, none of it mattered, that situation is resolved and the resolution is out of my control.  The more I say that, the more I believe it and the more I believe it the more relieved I am about it.
What do I look to for goodness and hope?  Externally, there is very little.  It really makes me judge myself pretty hard for the superficiality I've been living my life with for the last 3 years.  I surrounded myself with things that made me feel good, so I didn't really have to do any work myself.  I think I was grabbing whatever was available and shoving it into the hole left by my mother, that pain isn't going away.  I haven't been half the man I was in my mid 20's, I've been disconnected.  I'm being a little hard on myself, I guess, I did a lot of really good emotional work, just not sustained.  I had lots of distractions and never really allowed myself to hear my own voice.  I welcomed distractions, I begged for distractions, booze, hobbies, stupid flirty shit... it was all because I didn't want to face things.  I didn't want to open the doors of grief... I hate grief.  For so many things in our lives it's easier to just "forget" than to grieve.  The problem is some things simply will not be forgotten.  My previous two relationships and my mother are really good examples for me in my life.  If I don't really do some grief work with this stuff I'll be permanently damaged.  I'm not saying that my heart doesn't and won't always have these 3 incredible women living in it until it stops beating, but if I don't somehow come to terms with reality and how to operate in it, there will never be room for someone else in there, and I know that's not what they want.
I have wept everyday for nearly 2 weeks, I have never done that before, especially not sober.  It's kind of bizarre to admit such a thing publicly like this, but I think it's significant.  I'm really feeling things, bad things, things that really tear apart the fabric of who I am.  Things that challenge my identity.  The fact that I'm willing to, not only, soak in it, admit it and allow it but forgive myself is really powerful for me.  It's not just saying I'll surrender, it's a spiritual act of surrender.  Fighting things that are inevitable is foolish.  "The wisdom to know the difference" is the most confounding of the three virtues in the serenity prayer.  Often it's much harder to decide whether you need to splay your heart open to change something or if you need to look in the mirror and accept it than it is to actually do those things.  The trouble is, a wrong choice here can be just as damaging on either side of that coin.  If you accept something you could change you could have missed an opportunity of a lifetime and be left with regrets and "should haves."  If you pound your head against the wall of something you can't control you're just amplifying the pain and you become more and more helpless, damaged and hurt in a way that might never be mended.  Either way... it's a touchy crossroads. 

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