Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour...

I had a day with some peace.  It doesn't say much more than my gratitude at that.  I was able to do more than a few things that might have been beyond me for the last few years.  I played hockey with my son in the driveway, not once but twice.  I paid attention to my very tried, sleepover at the neighbors exhausted daughters.  I was sweet and kind to my wife.  

I am grateful to no end for that.   

I attended a meeting tonight and I shared much more personally than I ever have.  I talked about growing up in the very center of chaos.  No parents, crazy and violent siblings and just the level of depravity and insanity.   Then, one day when I was 10, my mother just not being there ever again when I came home from school.  The splintering of my family, the isolation, the abandonment.   I shared some of that, of what made me who I am, this hot mess of dysfunction and depression.  I feel lost in self-pity at times, or maybe more than I'd ever like to think I do, OK, maybe all the time, but my story is one that denotes first a horror of the cumulative and immediate effects of trauma, but second and more so every day in this new chapter, a survival.   My T never ceases to express amazement that I am still standing.  I always look at her askew when she earnestly says that, as my last T did as well.  I know not the context of what they see, so I shrug it off.  

I am grateful for one day, one day of peace, or at least the first day of the ceasefire.

Z Fly Y Curl X Post

So, on this most super of sabbaths, a veritable homage to the excess of our culture, I am feeling a little less than superb.  Nothing particular, just the ongoing challenge of sussing out my course as I try to take one step in front of the next.  Today's whimsy is surrounding compulsion version addiction.  My wife, who's opinion I respect, has been pushing me not so subtly into some type of 12-step program surrounding my infidelity.  She is having a great deal of struggle with the issue, of course, but as well how I could have done what I've done without some sort of addiction to it.  Her great fear is that I am going to "relapse" and go all wiggy like that again.  I certainly understand her feelings, and very much her fear.  She has said, how can you go from doing all that at 3000mph to suddenly doing nothing?  I guess, and it is how I've explained it to her, that it wasn't a pleasurable thing, it was never about sex, it was something else, something more compulsive.  

I knew what I was doing wasn't real and wasn't right, but I wouldn't stop myself.  It was pain I enjoyed.  It was horror that gave me solace.  It was a relief to feel a known pain, ahead of the new pain I was feeling.  It was comfortable to have such messed up and destructive and horrific things in my life to re-center and make me feel whole, or at least the whole I used to feel before I got so overrun.  

I am not afraid, if I am honest, that I might be an addict and I would admit it in a second, if I felt it in my heart of hearts.  But being a cutter, and I don't miss cutting myself.  I don't miss the pain, the guilt, the agony I was living and reliving.  Every person I was with was a victim of sexual abuse, physical abuse and had serious mental health issues.  I found them, just as they were looking for me.  I relived the traumas of growing up in a home with abuse, with a violently mentally ill mother, with mentally ill siblings who were sexually, emotionally and physically abused...  I relived all of that, cause I never dealt with it.  I was compelled, by that silly subconscious thingy to live out and re-live out what I'd never dealt with.  I don't see the addict in there, but I might be wrong.