Smooth and Supple is Bad in Landing Gear

For my 50th post, I am going to write something of the truth that I've learned about myself.  I am looking for a mother.  A great deal of my life's troubles, and alas, there are a few, stem from that drive.  I am not seeking out some great Oedipal thing, but more the basics - care and comfort in the arms of the mother I never really had.  

So much of my behavior over the last 4 years has been the subconscious drive to find peace when I've had none.  I've driven so hard and so long with nothing, that my infantile brain began to remind me that I needed something, and desperately so.  This is not a knock on my SO, as she is neither my mother nor does she ever need to be.  That said, she is not the nurturing, warm and gushy type.  She just isn't, and it isn't in her DNA nor her experience.  She has many charms, and is a good person, but doesn't smother with love.

But like so many men who've reached my age without ever having had a mothering experience, there is some primal drive to get there that seems to overtake.  The women I've spent time with outside my marriage, damaged and unhinged as they all were (that is my real mother), all, to a one, had the mothering gene.  It was the only comfort I got from the relationships, even as they inevitably turned to a borderline (pun intended) disaster.  I would get care and comfort, mothering of sorts, but at the only place I've ever known it, the crazy bar.  

That sounds like a basic thing, to call this a learned truth, but to be honest, I don't think I understood what the hell I was doing to myself, and why I was doing it during that time.  Every single relationship and pursuit was to find my mother, or at least the crazy version I know, because I need to feel that love.  

Now, to greater things upon realization, and that is to find that love.   I don't really know where to look.

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.  
 

No, I'm Not Saying I'm Sorry

No, No, No, No!!!

Saw the T today.  It was pleasant, fun and a little weird, in the good way.  It was the last of my 6 EAP sessions.  I am better, there is no doubt and there is hope on the horizon.  We talked a lot of my resentments and my frustrations with how things have been.  

There were a couple of salient moments, moments of great solace and comfort.  First, is that she validated what I've know for so long.  That I've lived a left so bereft of care and comfort, so absent of basic human contact, that I have sought it, when I needed it most, the only comfort I've ever known, even in the arms of the crazy and malicious.  

I'm truly sorry.  I am who I am, the product of where I've come from, where I've been, and not going anywhere specific, but to safety and security.  I wish there was no such thing as fighting, that the world could just be this perfect place and everybody could just get along, but obviously that can't happen... 1:42...  The look says everything I feel... 

I've Got A Dangling Chad

Life is weird. I know I am the first person to ever say that.  For my originality, I am pretty proud.  Ok, that's not totally true.  But I am feeling the burden lift of my demons.  Maybe not perfect, maybe not ideal, but not the same as its been.  I stood in a colleague's office today, yelling and dropping F-bombs about something retarded that his retarded boss was asking for that is actually in my domain.  I was passionate, engaged and committed to my craft and trade and it eeked out in violence of action.  I was in the game and it was obvious.  I care.   Deeply.  Passionately.  At one point, someone 40 feet down the hall sent an email to my colleague asking if everything was OK, cause all they heard were F-bombs and yelling.  I had an audience of really smart people hanging on my every word and fully engaged and revelling in the mirth of the show.  I was teaching, engaging and funny.  They learned some incredibly complex concepts during my little show and were smiling and laughing at my outburst.  It was the wunderkind teaching how deep the skilllzzzz go.   There was shock and awe. 

I've not done that in 10 years.   

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....