Living at the Eight and a Halfs

Depression leaves me at the eight and a halfs.  You know when you are in the hospital, and they ask you to explain where your pain is on a scale of 1 to 10?  I explained to someone today that when I get to the point where my internal suffering passes 8.5 on the scale, that there is nothing I wouldn't do to make it stop.  I used the analogy that I would cut off my own arm, and that it might even seem logical to do that, to make it stop.  I mean, what's crazier, thinking that cutting off your arm might solve the problem, or starting to wonder if it is, in fact, crazy to think it is crazy...

I shared as well the real trauma at the eight and a halfs...   The constant failures.  The failure to do much more than raise your head above the pillow, to accomplish one single thing beyond breathing all day and then the lumps.  The lumps of self-flaggelation, self-loathing and self-hatred for letting yourself and others down yet again...  

If only I could just do something, anything, it would be better.  I've survived a hundred debillitating traumas, but I can't make my brain do what I need it to do.  That's a horrific sensation living at the eight and a halfs.

Short on Posting, Long on Self-Pity

The truth of the matter is that I've had a setback of sorts in my depression.  I am back to feeling exhausted and worn out.  The positive looking side of me says that it is a natural whiplash effect from all the stuff I've been touching on the inside that just asked for some time to heal and regroup.  The negative side feels a little hopeless and lost in the return of the canius negra.   But the loudest voice is the positive one, though not always...

I am still doing all the my work, still attending meetings, still talking and learning as much as I can.  I am still doing one or three little things to improve the pace every day, but I am tired, woefully so.  It does bother me that I felt like I was winning, but sometimes I think it's a sin, to feel like I'm winning when I'm losing again... 

Gunter Glieben Glauchen Globen

It starts with nonsense and then it gets nowhere, fast.  

Today I won.  

I am not less than I was when I awoke.  And for that, I win.  

If you've been there, you know what I mean.  
 

Like a Dirty Sock, Dirty Sock, Dirty Sock

I am back.  Was a productive downtime.  I really had gone too far, too fast and was in danger of implosion.  Implosion for me is to begin to disassociate and to live outside myself, finding solace for my pain in everything and anything that resolves it, even if only for a second.  It does lend itself to some guilt that with an illness that takes all of the good from life for so many, that I have found a few little behavioral things that can offer a touch of relief.  That is completely said in an ironic voice, as those "things" are also incredibly self-destructive and self-mutilating.  

So what have I been doing?  Well, the depression that I woke up with on Saturday, the day after my self-imposed blogging exile, has passed.  I was doing too much and I am grateful being measure that I got a wake up call before I sunk deeper.  Chalk one up to my enthusiasm, and the good sense to surround myself with people who've got good sense, as I seem to lack it sometimes.  Since then, life has been ok.  Up and down with the SO, but that is a matter of a) my inlaws visiting, always a stressful experience and b) some of the anger she feels towards me bubbling to the surface.  I am ok with the anger, and I feel I deserve it, but it is very counter-productive to making things better.  I simply don't handle it very well, and shut down emotionally when she's on me.  And that is exactly a trigger for her to get angrier.  I feel as though her angry side just wants to hurt me, hurt me as I've hurt her, regardless of the consequences.  She's let it fly a few times and I feel like I've been in the ring for 30 seconds with a young Mike Tyson.  It leaves me dazed and confused and seriously riding my internal self-mutilation pony.  I get on that little horse and pound and beat on myself until I am thoroughly ass-kicked and bleeding for all orifices.  But while some shame and remorse in this situation is good and needed, it doesn't help that I don't have a healthy way of handling those feelings and only abuse myself with them.  

With that, I've exhausted myself again, but I'll be back for another episode of my valiant, vainglorious battle through the Noonday Demons....   

We Aren't Going to Go There

Went to the marriage T tonight.  I am ambivalent about the experience, but after a sleep, I expect to be all cool with it.  The MT went through all the systems and processes for how he runs his deal, and it all made real sense.  It is based on the IMAGO approach from some guy who wrote some book about getting the love you need.  It broke down into the same lizard brain versus the frontal cortex discussion that I've focused my depression T on and my mindfulness approach to doing 3 little things every day.  So I was all cool.  Then he said that we weren't going to get into the betrayal at this first session as it is too charged with emotion.  I thought, cool that makes sense, and lines up with my trying to approach things with the antithesis of my usual approach to charge headlong and aggressively into everything I "go after".  

So, near the end, we started doing one of the exercises, and what do we end up talking about?  My infidelity.  I felt crushingly shamed sitting here talking to some guy I just met about the singularly most shameful acts of my existence, in front of someone who is still very hurt and angry about my actions.  It kicked my ass a bit, to be totally honest and I am feeling incredibly emotionally fucked up.  I am living with a weight of shame and remorse, and I don't feel terribly much like adding to that burden while I am also trying desperately to lift my head out of a major depression.  I am not trying to make a cope out or excuses, because I am responsible for what I've done, I am just trying to find a pace of healing that lets me survive this.  Yes, these are my actions, based on compulsions I can't understand or quantify, to self-mutilate in search of something, something I know not totally what I was looking for.  I do know that I damn near destroyed myself in the process, and hurt my SO so greatly that I am still at risk of losing her.  

I know I need to make amends, but I can't do it if it will destroy me in the process.  It is clear to me that I need to take time and place with this, even at the risk of hurting her a little bit more, because I want to survive this to make it through.  It sounds dramatic, and overwrought, but anyone who's been to the darkness knows that you don't compound your exit from it with more horror.  I need a beachhead of safety and relative personal sanity, and I am getting there.  This is not a rip the bandaid off moment, that's my usual self-mutilating stupidity. 

Sing a Song of Sweetness

There is no specific thought or theme in my mind as I sit down to wordvomit.  I am cognizant of the fact that there is peace in simply exercising the disciplines of writing of my inner sanctum.  The day, in and of itself, was not remarkable, though my grumpiness at work was noticeable, it didn't translate to the homespace, as I spent the evening nurturing the kiddies and playing games and sports.  It seems a little strange to have that paradigm inverted, but I'll take it 100 fold.   

Tomorrow is the counseling with the SO.  I am a little nervous, as I am sure I have to tell the "story".  It makes me feel great shame to tell where I ended up, and more than a little denuding to tell wherein I came from.  I guess from my last T session I feel a little better as she asked me what percentage of survivors of childhood abuses like I suffered truly survive to have "successful" lives.  I hemmed and hawed, and she talked about massive longitudinal research studies, murders, suicides, incarcerations, institutionalization and told me that only 12% of people who've lived my life have survived.  1 in 8.33 I whipped back at her.  It floored me more than a little, and still to this moment fills my heart with some emotion that I can't shake.  Maybe pride, maybe guilt, maybe doubt?  I don't know.  But while I have wallowed greatly in my ocean of self-pity, hanging on by a thread, I have in fact, hung in there.  I guess, even at the weakest correlation, that is somewhat amazing.  

The fact is, that I know that 1 in 8 all too well and can simply expand my personal horizon to my own wider family and see that that ratio holds true, and then some.  It is sad, sad, sad.  I am not crazy, as we talked about with my T, and the most probable conclusion we could draw is that I've never stopped fighting back.  As I said in the concussion post, I will brawl until the death, just give me a chance.  I know others who've fought, but mostly with themselves.  I fought my torment, my tormentors and never stopped.  Maybe that's the deal, but I don't know.  But I'll take it for now, and sleep soundly.   

Take Me Higher! Higher!

I shall, by all intents, be brief in my ramblings this fine soiree.   I am still wiped out from not sleeping for a couple of days but I am pretty ok with that.  I know that so much of my not sleeping is due to the emotional over stimulation of the last week.  I really am ok with that, as I see it as the portal to growth.  And I feel, in some little, tiny, infinitesimal way I am growing.   That makes me feel so happy.  

In my weekly home group meeting of Al-Anon this evening, I related a story to a fellow member of having been challenged with the whole concept of a Higher Power.  I am struggling, and probably always will with the concept.  I also related how I am trying to take some advice I was given on living with depression, and that was to focus on only 2-3 little things that you can point to every day on which you've changed something, even tiny, that will move you closer to being where you want to be.  I related how I'd done a chore that I'd been procrastinating on, with my eldest daughter helping, and we had a cool talk while we were doing it.  I related that I had done some other things as well.  But then I told about having taken my daughters to the dog park with the two much loved canines.  It was a lot of fun, and right at the end, my oldest asked if we could also walk the trail that surrounds the park. My first instinct was the usual no, as I was growing a little weary.  But something made the words "Sure" pop out of my mouth before I could even let the negative thoughts finish and off we went, having a fun, but addingly exhaustive walk with the pups.  It was a wonderful experience and I am feeling very emotional thinking about having done that.  My Al-Anon friend looked at me earnestly and said something quite profound.  "Who do you think it was that said yes?  It was your Higher Power, of course".

Cooking Sous Vide

Feeling the pressure.  On all fronts.  In some ways, I feel like I've entered the kill zone and am being subtly threatened from the front and my flanks.  Not in some paranoid way of others seeking to harm, just the realization that I've got some stuff coming at me that is taking a great gulp of my psychic energies. 

Work is stressful, as I am dealing with an influx of corporate masters all eager to look at the new toy.  I am, as I've said, that new toy.  They're eager as beans to talk with the big brain who has a knack for making all the other big brains do big brain things like come up with revolutionary ideas to retool the whole place on the same scale as the original business retooled the industry we live in.  We'll see, but tomorrow is a presentation to all the biggest poobaahs and poobettes about the "thing".   Nervous, but confident all at the same time.

Got an email from an old friend outlining a betrayal that rocked their world and that they never have overcome.  It killed me in light of my betrayal and the impact of that on my SO.  I am feeling, maybe a good thing, the impact of her hurt and I am in a bit of self-loathing around it.  I feel like I am at risk, if not now, but later, of losing her and it scares me.  I told her that today, and it scared me to even tell her.  

A couple of days ago, I asked the SO about marriage counselling and if she'd call a friend we have who's in the business and see if she'd make a recommendation.  The response was a recommendation and a request that I call said friend.  I called her this afternoon, from a conference room at work, and she asked me to outline what has been going on with me.  I told her and she asked me a bunch more questions.  Then she started pushing me a bit to see if I understood that I was dealing with deep-seeded stuff, not just the present.  I told her that I was entirely aware of the psychodynamic nature of my issues and that I was in deep.  We talked some more, and she was really supportive, cautioning to take things slow.  Then she dropped a bomb on me. 

I will leave this post with the question she asked that rocked me back into my seat and slammed my heart into my spine.  She asked me.  "Who in your life is a positive male role model that you want to be like, that you aspire to be like and who you'd take positive feedback from?"   

I Wanteth but Can Not Yet Haveth

I mean it.  I am not kidding, nor am I playing.  I am serious, and I wish I could make that unequivocally clear.  My wonderful and talented wife is struggling with my betrayal, and I wish I had a magic wand to fix it.  I believe she wants to make it work, I do, but I also know she is hurt by my actions.  I can't say more than I am sorry and that I will do anything I need to, in order to make it right.  That is not out of some preservatory instinct of saving my home and hearth, but a simple truth of my realization that it is what I want.  

I never meant for it to get like this, to be so low in my flow as to seek shelter in puddles of acid.  I never meant for that.  But my head hasn't been right for a long time, 7.5 years, like I said yesterday.  My depression, a wicked, wicked beast, put me in a place where I made all the wrong choices.  But therein lies the rub, it was a choice, or repeated choices, and for that I am, and I am alone responsible.  I need to own my choices and be accountable.  I didn't cheat because she is a bad person, I did so to play out a drama to soothe my inner torment.  I didn't have to do that, but I did.  It cannot be differently said.  I could have done a thousand things, but I chose to do something that would hurt someone I hold very dear the most.  

You might ask if it is because she is some wallflower that she is seeking to make this work.  It is in no way true, and in fact is diametrically the opposite from my perspective.  She's gotten so much better in the last few years, and is so much more aware, and has grown as I have shrunk.  She can care about me, even in this state, and even in this place, becuase she is strong.  But she feels de-valued, and I can't fix that with a bon mot or two.  I wish, and want nothing more than to ease her burden.  This isn't about her, it is about me and my failings, my going untreated for a brain ravaging disease, choosing the safety of a replay of my causal pschyo-dramas over being a grown man and asking for, and getting help.  I am not self-flagellating, I am speaking my truth in the hope that I can be better for accepting it.  

I want what I can not have, some sanity and safe harbor for her.  At least not yet.   But I want it more than anything I have ever wanted.  

Bang Your Head! Metal Health Will Drive You Mad....

This scares the hell out of me.  It almost scares me to death, to be frank.  I played a lot of competitive sports as a kid, through my twenties and early thirties.  Sports for me inevitably involved me being knocked out cold.  No joke.  In some sort of macho, testosterone-induced masochism, I would partake in only sports that were violent (hockey, football) or sports I could make violent (soccer, baseball).  I led with my thick skull and initiated more than a few fights which involved knuckles bouncing off my pretty face and granite-lick cranium.  I feel for Mr. Duerson and his family. 

I wish I knew if there was some causality to the depression I've faced.  I certainly haven't had the sheer quantity or intensity of the collisions that a pro athlete faced, I still know that there if they took a slice of my brain, there are significant Tau proteins gumming up the works.  It scares me in light of my inability to complete rid myself of depression.  I've been depressed, as far as I can tell, for the last 7.5 years.  There've been no real non-depressed moments in that time.  There's been an ebb and flow in the severity, like now where it is more dysthymic than major depression, but it never leaves totally.  I worry, worry, worry, that I am never going to feel normal again.  I saw this cartoon today, it spoke volumes.   I can't shake the sense that it just isn't ever going to be right, what with the abuse, neglect, self-mutilation, shame & even the physiological effects working against my, like the tide rolling in and me with a bucket with a hole in it.

Enter the Dragon

So much of today is about tests.  The truth of my reality right now is that my work is going swimmingly.  More than that in fact.  My corporate masters, at least those that interact with me, are falling over one another to praise themselves for hiring me and letting me do my thing.  There are two more corporate masters (of my corporate masters no less), are going to get the full Punch effect this week and while I admit to a little nervousness, for being the zoo animal on display, I am pretty confident in the equine power I bring and the stuff I know.  The dragon has entered. 

This is hard for me, as you can probably tell from my tone.  I am confident, but I can't take compliments.  In fact, I deflect most of the credit onto my team for their efforts, and struggle to take any on myself.  It is just something I don't do.  I focus more on what I haven't done, what depression has robbed me of, of certain skills and abilities that I don't know if I'll ever get back, and not on what I've done, through skill, guile and leadership to make revolutionary some basic concepts.  I am seen, for right or for wrong, as a thought leader on a space I honestly knew nothing about 6 months ago, and others have been working in for years.  In my blindness and self-deprecation, I feel like I could have done more, that I am in some way fraudulent, because I've coasted in relative terms, to what I consider I should be capable of.  I really need to stop that, because it gets me nowhere.  I've done this and I need to take credit for it.


Tonight, at dinner, between singing my praises, I was asked by the big boss what I want to be when I grow up.  Strange that at my 40+ years that I'd get that question, but he knows that I have the horsepower to do a hell of a lot more than I've done already.  I'm the poster child for the people they want to hire and he essentially told me that I can have whatever role I want.  I am trying to emotionalize that statement, and not see it as too much of a paternal validation (he's younger than me, so that's not hard).  But I also need to see the value of what others see in me.  I need to accept, emotionalize it and feel valued for what I've done.  I want that very desperately, to be happy for myself. 

No More Puns, I'm Begging You

Part of my charm, if I do indeed have any, is my utter lack of self-awareness coupled with a deep-seeded self-consciousness.  That sounds like a contradiction, but I am only self-conscious about the parts that I have any awareness to.  Its a gift, I am sure.  Or something. 

I thought a lot today, about where I am going, taking stock in where I've come from, how I am feeling and what I need to do to get better.  The immediate depth of depression has lifted, I am not despondent, and to that I credit attending Al-Anon meetings and T sessions.  I am still feeling the comforting normalness of dysthymia, but I hope that I can work on that a bit.  I also attribute the improvement to the commitment to change that I've made and the little victories I've won.  This blog is a big victory for me, in making. meeting and staying with a commitment, being accountable.  It has caused some friction with my wife, as she has expressed in moments where her anger about my actions has piqued her, that I am able to share and be open here, but not with her.   She reads some of what I write, I've not hidden what I am doing here, I've tried to overcome my shame/hiding instincts, but I can't speak what I can write.  I actually have hope, at least intellectually in both things, one that she wants that kind of relationship with me, that makes me feel valued and I would love that kind of relationship with her.  Second, I have been very focused on feeling what I write, something I know that if you've read some of my aborted posts, you can see.  

So, tonight, I hit an Al-Anon meeting in a blinding snowstorm.  The highway to get there was closed on the way home.  I arrived at the meeting and there were only 3 other people there. Turns out the only people stupid or desperate enough to hit an Al-Anon meeting in a blinding snowstorm are men.  No women.  Might be a first that I've ever heard of that.  

Waiting for the Hammer

It was rough and hard and nasty and foul and repulsive.   I was devastated.  I felt like my innards were going to come out my outards all in one fell swoop.  And then I realized how much she must have been hurting and how rotten that made me as a human being, that I was so mean and so cruel.  She's resilient, but it doesn't matter, in one moment, I was raging and screaming at a 9 year old in a way that didn't reflect how I believe a loving father should be.  I am still sad, sad at my ability to hurt her, even if I had some reason to be angry, my response was so out of proportion to her actions.  

There is a story to this, and it starts with my "man cancer" 4 years ago.  Due to the loss of a testicle and the trauma to the other one, my ability to produce testosterone was greatly diminished.  I hadn't really the sign that every thinks should happen, in a Bob Dole late night TV kinda way, so I didn't make a big deal at first, but with the floating tree of depression, and low T being a major factor, I decided, along with my Dr., to try T-replacement therapy.  Being the do-anything-for-a-dollar kinda guy I am, he asked me at the time if I'd try a new therapy that involved a little tab that you shoved up under your lip and in the crevice of your gums, just above your incisors.  So, other than a really messy set up, these buccal tabs introduced WAY too much T into my system.  Like Pro Wrestler, NFL Linemen levels of T.  I raged out at everything and was constantly in a state of out of control arousal.  We ended up with an approach that made a steady level for me, and all was well.  

Recently, we moved back to the Northern Socialized paradise, and there were a couple of new methods of replacement available, most notably, an oral med.  I've tried it, I've liked it, except for the stomach upset and the nausea for the first 30 mins after taking it.  Well, having felt a little blue, I was thinking I should adjust my dose a bit and add an additional caplet to my regimen.  I did that last evening.  There appears to be about a 12-16 hour lag time on constant use and that left me with an elevated level this AM.  This is the root of my downfall.

She said something really rude to me, as all 9yr olds start to do as they test their boundaries.  I leapt right in her face and screamed at the top of my lungs at her.  I cannot remember being that angry at anything or anyone and I was hopelessly paralyzed for a few minutes.  I couldn't believe what I had done.  I was an awful, rotten person.  

It took me about 30 minutes to figure it all out, as I was about to pop my morning dose after a coffee.  I was soothed, but still devastated.  I don't want to ever be that person.  It was wrong and I was so sorry, and I am so sorry.  I wish I could take it back and not have taken that extra pill.  The BATO (beautiful and talented one) was very supportive and keyed in right away and asked me about my meds.  (She's pretty smart and smart pretty).  We had a beautiful evening eating pink pancakes that the 9yr old made and I tried to make it up a little by getting the kids some sweet valentine's presents, but I still feel bad.  In retrospect, knowing that something is out of your control is one thing, living with the consequences is another.

Feeling Like a Crustacean

I am a very selfish person.  I am very self-centered and self-absorbed.  I spend all of my time hovering inside the confines of my own head.  My recovery, as it is, is very self-focused, self-driven and decidedly narcissistic to date.  I go to meetings, and I write in a blog, I go to sessions with my T, I frequent forums online that allow me to express what I find so hard to express in any way other.  

I attended, with the very lovely and very talented one, an anniversary open meeting for a local Al-Anon group.  The speakers were a couple who'd had 80 years in program between them.  Firstly, it was wonderful to go out with my wife, even under the current strains, but mostly I knew that I wouldn't feel uncomfortable in that setting, short of the uneasiness I feel that I know that there are people there that she has told about my idiocy and my hurtful behaviors.  But even in that, I knew, and know, that they are not there to judge me, and that as long as I continue to try to reach out, that I will even feel comfortable with that.  But the speak said something, and I heard him loud and clear.  He spoke about always having felt different, always having felt uncomfortable in his skin.  I heard that loud and clear.  But then he said something I really heard, and that was that he was an entirely selfish person.  Totally self-absorbed in the context of his own pain.  It felt like an arrow in my heart, because I heard my own feelings being expressed out loud.  That is me, and who I've been for my adult life.  Wrapped up in the real agony I've been feeling and gradually having everything else obscured to it.  I don't see anything or anyone else, for the thundering sound of my unresolved fears.  

I am trying, in the moment, to slow down and sit with my feelings, so to speak, because I feel a great deal of guilt around this realization.  I am struggling to do the one thing I really need, and that is to comfort myself with the realization that I can do a million little cumulative things to change myself and my actions.  It is pretty hard to even contemplate forgiving myself, frankly because I don't know how to do that.  But that is what I need.  

I Know All There is to Know. About the Crying Game

Here's why I cry.  I cry at movies with dogs or kids who are in trouble or die and I cry when my pets die, but not every time.  I cry when a sibling or a sibling's spouse dies.  That is the extent of my tears.  It has been the extent of my tears for 20 years, at least until today.  It reminds me of the old joke where the army sergeant tells his assembled troops "everyone who's mother is still alive, take one step forward - not so fast there Jones...".  

So, what in tarnation made me cry you may ask with sincere and genuine concern?  Ah yes.  Well, it was as simple as having had my efforts at starting down this road to recovery questioned.  I've been trying like nothing I've ever tried before.  I've reached out and asked for help, I've cut off unhealthy things, I've tried to do a bunch of little improvements in my life every single day, I've journaled (blogging here), I've gone to therapy, I've talked as much as I know how to about my feelings, I've gone to Al-Anon meetings regularly and worked on as much as I can honestly handle and I've tried to do everything to show to myself first and foremost that I am not going to live under the bridge with depression anymore.  

I am not sitting here asking for a prize.  I am not really looking for validation for trying to undo some of what I've done to her.  I don't deserve that, and I am not asking for it.  My committment to getting better is as much about me getting better as it could ever be about making it so that she wants me to stay here.  I mean that, and I hope it stays true.  I need to be better because I am exhausted at feeling so bad.  I've had enough and hit the floor, hard.  She was feeling a pique of anger, anger that I rightfully expect her to have, and then she laid into me for doing something that I thought was innocuous.  It escalated and then she laid into me some more for not doing enough to make it better.  I was distraught and just started wailing.  I mean, losing it.  I literally ran out of the room, and locked myself in a dark closet.  I lost all hope.  I really did.  I bawled for what was minutes, but felt like epochs.   She came and soothed me, not so much as I was expecting her to, becuase I didn't really know if she would or not, nor was I trying to manipulate her, I just felt hopeless.  

I went to a meeting tonight, and I sat at a table that was about having the courage to change.  I am trying, and I am committed. I really am, just feeling a little adrift at the moment.

Standing in the Doorway Just Killin' Time

I am coming up on my birthday.  Not that one, the other one.  See, four years ago, roughly about this time I was struggling like a mofo with some pain in my groin.  Longest story possible short, it was testicular cancer.  Turns out that there was a stage 1a tumor in there that was causing blood flow issues and causing my right testicle to go necrotic.  It hurt just a bit.  Just a little bit, like more than anything ever.  For all those with Y chromosomes, I am sorry I made you squirm.  February 18th is my new birthday.  I was born again, from the land of the emotional suffering delusionally.  Every year, we've had a cake with the kids to celebrate Daddy overcoming "Penis Cancer".  It is just easier to let it ride than try to explain to them.  :)

I mention it, and it will come up again as we aproach the date, but it comes with some very bittersweet news.  A person I'd worked with at "that place" who I liked very much and had kept in touch with over the last 3 years lost his battle with bone cancer last night.  At the risk of narcissism, I wanted to share how I feel, and how his passing is a real kick in the nut for me.  His wife blogged all the way through their ordeal, of his brief remission and their life together.  They were obviously very happy people and as I knew him, he was a wonderful person.  They had two small kids and she is a very successful artist.  When I found out he'd been diagnosed, I reached out to him and gave him some support from someone who'd had some of the experiences he was about to go through.  They both replied and thanked me, and it was sweet as can be.  But now, I am devastated and feeling like rat shit on the bottom of a dung beetle's shoe.  I survived where he didn't.  I have broken the one person who's always stood by me's trust and I am the one here.  It might sound like self-pity, but it is more my only known expression of my guilt and my grief.  

In the midst of all of this, I am better.  Depression, in its most devastating form has overrun my life and I appear to have lived to tell the tale.  I've turned the corner, but am still far from home.  I have rotten thought patterns, a self-esteem rotted with abuse and self-abuse, a skewed perspective on my place in this world and a thousand billion amends to make.  But I am breathing.   And that's a lot.  
 

A Day Spent Fishing

Don't really like fishing.  Seems cruel to my gentle soul.  But I am reeling a bit.  Not in some terrible way, just from the hardness of my T session and coming to grips with realizing how much I hurt myself, over and over, with the same repetitions of the very trauma I've sought to escape.  It seems so sad, so very, very sad that I've done that to myself over and over.  It isn't funny, nor is it deniable in any way.  It is who I've become and I am a little distraught over it, to be total honest.  I hurt myself, in the exact same way that I've been hurt.  I re-victimize myself.  It make me well with emotion to even consider that I've done that to my self.  But I have, and I haven't even been aware.  

 My wife sat me down today and asked me what would happen when work became boring.  She looked me straight in the eye and asked me what would happen when I wasn't getting the big brain validation any more and I got restless, where would I turn.  It was a rotten question, even if it is entirely valid.  I held myself together as much as I could and said to her that I had no idea, I was working on much more basic shit at the moment.  I haven't shared with her the outcome of my T session yesterday, mainly b/c I am afraid of getting into a whole "you are a cheating douche-nozzle who I don't even know" conversation.  I am those things, but it is still so raw for her that I am not able to share any context.  

Why did I cheat?  Easy in the context of my T session yesterday, and something that I've had some awareness to.  It wasn't a sex addiction thing, that just isn't where I was at.  It is as easy as having two sisters violently sexually abused for years and subsequently going off the rails and no longer being function human beings.  It is as simple as the violently sexually abused mother who tried to escape her childhood traumas but never did, disappearing one day when I was 10, two weeks after her abusing step-father passed away, never truly to be heard from again as a parent.  I've never made it back from either the immediate nor progressive nature of the horrors inflicted on me by the culmulative horrors inflicted upon them.  Not an excuse, but in the context of me going outside my marriage, to find the most fucked up and damaged women I could, to run a gambit of trying to bring safety and stability into their lives...   It was myself replaying my life's traumas in a short beat.  Everyone of them, and there were 3 longer relationships in the last 3 years, was the same abused, broken and neglected person as the last, and the same as my tormentors.  I saw it at the end, in the last person, who was very much my most abused sister's latent twin and it repulsed me.   I saw what I was doing and decided to stop.  

It still hurts to write these things, and I am reeling from the scars I've caused my gentle inner kid.  I've really hurt him, and I am sad for that.  I've spent most of my adult life consciously protecting that 10 year old, yet I was also his greatest tormentor.  I am those things, and in that I reel.   

Help, I've Done it Again

Saw the T again for the first time in two weeks today.  She got me the full 6 sessions through the Employee Assistance Program, cause she told them I'd had suicidal ideation.  Gotta respect that, now don't we kids.  It was a pretty good session, which I usually judge on how shitty and worn out I feel afterwards.  The more I feel like I've scrubbed the innerbeing with sandpaper to clear off a layer, the better I feel about my progress.  Sounds sadistic, but with some experience on doing T, I know that in a day or two, there will be re-growth and a small movement forward.  

I think the most meaningful part of the T was the way we talked about why it is that I've done some of the things I've done.  We went through the history, the abandonment, the physical and sexual abuse, the emotional violence, the traumas and all that ancillary fun and games that I call a past.  It has at times, I've seen, in both weight and mass taken a T or two a step or two back with the sheer magnitude of it all.  I say that in the same context as I said yesterday, harking on my amazing resiliency at overcoming trauma.  I earned that ability, through experience and scarring.   But, alas, I digress on a thought of yesterday. 

She asked me whether I had anything going with anyone "on the side."  I answered honestly that I didn't, and that the only contact I've had with anyone is to break contact if they contacted me.  She sounded a little shocked, it seemed, and repeated the question.  I was earnest and honest that I've done nothing.  I am truly not going there, at least in the current context.  It makes me feel so damn yucky, something I told my T and I am want nothing to do with feeling yucky like that again.  She's a clever one, my T and we pursued that on and off for the rest of the hour - the why and how I feel yucky.   

So, I am quite aware that I've pursued these "mini-dramas", not for the sex, because I am pretty ok without, but more so as a mechanism to change my focus from the crippling nature of the depression hell I've been living in.  I feel panicky?   I search out things that make it so that I can feel something different, something with the facade of validation.  But, after saying this, my T pressed me and asked me about the women I'd spent time with and why I felt so yucky about it.  It isn't what you'd think, something that I can't easily explain, nor have I been able to.  I seem to have picked, over and over again, the most damaged women to spend my time on.  Really.  Like, all victims of abuse as children, in abusive or vile relationships currently and in need of a wonderful man like moi to sweep them away and save them.  I've know there is a pattern, because I get so infected by the craziness of these women, or I did, that I end up further depressed, and moving to the next.  

The denouement?   She called me an emotional cutter.  She said in my depressed and self-loathing I would go and seek out inevitably hurtful situations, where I could re-enact the most basic features of the my childhood traumas and experience them all over again.  I could be hurt, badly, by someone who had lost all capacity to stop the hurt themselves.  I found them, because I attract them like sugar water.  It is as clear a sonar ping as I may have ever received.  Even now, many hours later, I feel the physical impact of the verity of those words.  I hurt myself, to ease the pain.  

Much Too Clever, by Half

It has been a long, emotionally wrought day for me.  That emotionality has been mostly self-inflicted and self-directed.  I've been a bit of a hot mess, in the feelings department over the last couple of days and having figured out the triggering event, having worked through my feelings and having talked about my actions that brought this together really has been very gritty.  I am feeling like I've taken one layer of protective covering off the place in my brain that allows my conscious emotional state to exist, rubbed it raw with sandpaper out of necessity and am now waiting for it to stop being so raw, entrench my gains with some peace, only to run it all raw again, until I get to something approximating an honest emotional state.  

I love to read about neuroscience and neurophysiology, along with neuropsych.   I am a fan of Daniel Goleman's work on isolating the emotional pathways along primal and non-primal routings.  In that vein, I am convinced, now with a little hindsight, that I must simply have the most awesomest, most developped, most ripped Limbic system in all of humanity.  I swear, I can actually feel the overwhelming bulk of my amygdala pressing against the hardness of my brain cavity.  I have an emotion, it is anger.  And primal anger at that, with a soupcon of rage thrown in, all finished in the sous-vide with a tower of self-pity thrown on top.  It is exhausting living every minute as though you are in mortal peril.  It is such a pathogen, being universally constrained to only a basic emotional state.  

Self-pity has been a theme for me in the last few days of writing, because quite frankly, I've let it consume so much of my life and let it come to define me as a person.  I am withdrawn, surly and depressed. I am the first to recognize the chemical nature of the problem I am struggling with.  I am the first to recognize that I've earned my depression, through both genetics and experience.  But what I am saying is that I've had enough, hit bottom so to speak, with letting it fully define me.  Inside, there's a pretty decent guy who generally has a warm, and big heart.  I want to be him on the outside, as much as I can, for as long as I can. 

Someone Left the Cake Out in the Snow

As those of us in the midwestern part of the continent un-bury our selves from the most overhyped marmotian experience of these new decade, I've found myself at the proverbial crossroads.  As I typed that, I could hear the haunting tears of Stevie Ray Vaughn spinning in my ears, but that is in fact Crossfire, not Crossroads...  :D   

My gait is back.  I am functioning somewhat normally again.  Grace to the amazing recuperative powers of my spirit, that I am so resilient to traumas that I leap back to my feet as quick as a whip.  Or, maybe, just maybe, I've had too much practice.  That sensation, of too much practice, is at the nexus of my ponderous state.  I know that being humbled, being made to be accountable to my emotions, to being present, in the moment, is the very salvation I seek.  That sense of connection with myself, my feelings, my heart so to speak, is all that I want to get out of life at this point, because the outcome is a tangible, meaningful life, rescued from the pinholes of the camera obscura I try to live my life through.    

I've been working hard in these past weeks, to be aware, to be conscious to be mindful.  But I don't want to lose this.  I am desperate in some senses to not losing this.  I am nothing without my brain and my brain is wasted living without my feelings.   So, I want to keep working, to make better my heart, for my wife and all that she's invested, for my kids and their innocent adulation of their Dad and mostly for me, to not hurt anymore, like I have.  

Depression, and self-pity.  They leave me at less than a millifraction of life.  In the next day or so, I am going to try to have a garage sale.  I am offering up a bunch of traumas and hurt I don't need anymore to the lowest bidder.  I will be marking all of my hell at prices that can't be refused.  I am more than willing to haggle and will be offering package deals.  It has a time in the process and it is coming.