Tell Me Lies Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

It starts here.  

Lies 

I read this posting today and I was floored by the fact that something I've been so crushingly ashamed of actually has a reasonable basis in logic and reason.  If I look at it with some honesty (ironic?) I would say that my lying falls into two parts of the definition.  First, I am over honest.  I spill everything and anything about some of my more intimate details very easily.  This blog is somewhat an evidence of that, if I consider it fully.  It is certainly evidence of a lack of practice with boundaries and understanding what "normal" is.  The other area that strikes me is the grandiosity lies.  It strikes me very much as a need to prop myself up and be seen as more than I feel I am.  Which if I take a breath for two seconds and look at what I've accomplished in life, in terms of professional and personal, there is no need for a prop.  But I can't shake that sense of drowning in the juices of my own stew.  I have nothing to be ashamed of for who I am on the inside, and that's something I need to grasp with both hands.  Maybe I wasn't born this way, but I sure earned it.

I am very tired again.  Emotionally worn out, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing.  I am working hard with muscles that I've frankly never to very rarely used.  I want to keep going, to move forward, more and more, but I am tiring quickly.  I am still doing my three things every day, and it feels good.  Somewhere on my list of next baby steps is my physical fitness level, but I am only cautiously stepping towards that one.

Realizing that I am a normal product of the chaos I grew up in is a safe feeling.  I like safe.  

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".

Talk Among Yourselves, Here's a Topic...

This is probably my first post in 40 days where I truly feel like I've got nothing.  It has been a tumultuous 24 hours of stress and relief and self-awareness and emotional over stimulation.  The work thing that I had to do to serve the biggest cheeses was a raving success.  It went past the point of self-affirmation and drifted into adulation.  Not an exaggeration, it was a clear affirmation that I still have all the work related skills that I've always had in relation to building and creating.  People are fighting over themselves to tell me how awesome I am.  I am somewhat ambivalent but still very proud of what we've accomplished, my little team of skunks.   I'll leave the dilemma I am faced with as an outcome of this success for another day.


I had my T app't today and it went very well, I didn't walk out with my emotional being oozing and bleeding from being rubbed raw.  I am tired, and very emotionally drained from the last part of my day, but I am very pleased with how it went.  Suffice to say that I have some real work to do in the lines of Sir Oedipus, and some concepts to grasp and internalize there.  It rings very true, what we talked about there and I am grateful as hell for that.  We also talked about forgiving myself a bit.  Not a strength, and something I am also eager to learn more about and try to give myself a bit of a break on things, and see about healing. 


Last part of the day, the SO and I went to an Open Al-Anon meeting where a friend of the SO was giving her first talk.  It was emotionally wrenching.  Her story has a lot of the elements of mine, but also a lot of her own unique horror.  It hit me like a ton of bricks and I am feeling so over stimulated.  Adding to it is that this friend was also very cold to me afterward, in light of what's happened.  I am not upset at her, in fact I think it is pretty damn cool that she loves my SO so much as to take up for her, but it still stings me.  It'll be ok, I know she'll be ok with me, but at the time I was feeling a real connection, like only the horrifically abused can, and that hit me a bit.  


With that, I am souped out.  Nothing left in the cauldron.  Adieu. 

 

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.

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.

Holding Ace, Jack Showing

So, first and foremost, I did it.  I did it, I did it, I did it.  This is post 21.  Some surely intelligent person decided that 21 days was the required number of consecutive days you need to do something in order for it to be a habit.  So I did it.  21 days, of which at least 10 I didn't feel like doing it at all.  But, at the outset of the culmination of the debacle I've caused, I promised I would do little things to change my actions and behaviors.  Committing to something and actually sticking with it, through the pain of whatever I am feeling, not accepting an excuse to let myself down, being accountable to the one person I've consistently cheated out of decency (that would be me), well, I was earnest in my promise to myself.  So, that's pretty good, I think.  :)

I am sick today, picked up some kinda bug that's really taken a toll on my body and respiratory system.  I'll make it, just highlights that I have tried to keep going, unlike other setbacks where I'd lie in bed, figuratively and literally and wallow in my own emotional filth.  I still feel awful, just don't feel nearly as awful as I've felt before, where I pile on the physical with the emotional beating.  Better days.  

I am really feeling the whole having grown up in a crazy, dysfunctional home and having become somewhat crazy and pretty dysfunction.  Read a good blog post on the general topic that made me stop and think.  I am enjoying the whole stop and think thing.  Had a great argument with a more junior colleague at work today about hockey and I found myself applying many of the things I've learned going to Al-Anon, about listening and validating others, not having the goal be that we agreed, or better yet that he agreed with my viewpoint.  It was good practice for the real world. 

Shame! I'm Gonna Live Forever!

If it isn't obvious, I love to take syntactical linguistic meme's and flip them into something cutesy with a subtle turn of the phrase.  It makes me giggle, and is something that I actually like about myself.  There isn't much these days, so I gotta take what I can get, wouldn't you say?  

Shame.  It is my guiding force, my constant friend and the greatest companion to my faithful black dog.  It drives all of my emotional output, be that as limited as it may be, but it also is the loudest voice in my head.  I seem to have had some sort of arrested development in my emotional state, so cliché in children who grew up in homes seeped in addiction and abuse.  It doesn't give me much more than cold comfort, but I have a intellectual sense that that realization will become more crucial as we move further down this road. 

I am deeply ashamed of my behavior, most acutely in the last 3 or so years.  Somewhere between there and here, I ceased being a functional person, and have been somewhat of an abject failure as a father, husband, friend, employee and general person.  I went off the rails.  As I read in this blog and found some comfort, I too stopped drinking/drugs through sheer willpower many, many years ago.  What I didn't do was address any of the core elements that made me so afraid and so ashamed.  Four years ago, almost to this date, I developed a very serious illness.  Out of that illness, I had a hard breakdown.  Out of that breakdown, I entered counseling. Out of that counseling I developed a sense of misdirected entitlement to my own "happiness".  Out of that entitlement, I fell into serial infidelity.  

It was a yucky experience.  I picked the most damaged and disturbed woman for my partners.  I was very obviously trying to fix these women.  To salve my oozing open sores (shame, absence of self-esteem, anger, rage), I picked women who'd see me as their Knight in Shining armor and tell me, over and over how freaking awesome I was.  I would lie and manipulate to "appear" to be exactly that perfect. it was unconscious and uncontrolled, and I am deeply ashamed of that.  It worked, this medication, until the subtle realization that I was getting validation from incredibly compromised sources.  I feel gross for some of the things I've done, mostly in how freaking damaged, way beyond me, these women were.  

In December, I made the decision, tacit as it was, to stop doing this shit.  I'd had enough of the crazy shit I was doing and the fact that I couldn't take the baggage that I had to take to even come close to getting anything from it.  I had subconsciously recreated the drama of my life and it was destroying me.  

My heart is aching at the moment, so I will cut shorter than I intended this post, but suffice to say, it hasn't worked out for me very well in the corresponding month.  My wife, as wonderful as she is, discovered my infidelities and it prompted the broken place I am currently in.  This is my hell, one I created, one I am responsible for, one I need to be accountable for, but it can't be decoupled with the fact that I am deeply damaged from my childhood.  The hopeful side, other than her courageous decision to try to move forward together, is that I have descended as far down the rabbit hole as I am wanting to go, and I am asking for help.  But I am ashamed.  Deeply.    

Hurry! Fetch Me My Pithy Helmet!!!

Sitting at my desk, trying desperately to find the spark of inspiration that'll allow me to actually get something more than the random set of things that I get done most days.  You know, the common drudgery that most corporate entities expect their humble and grateful peons to perform in order to move the one pile of virtual paper to another.  I haven't really been able to do that for quite a while, maybe even counting into the years, except for brief moments of defenestration-inducing agony where I literally forced myself to complete it.  

I am struggling, in particular, with the most gruesome self-immolation today.  I am beating myself with reeds on the inside.  I am feeling so deeply, so intimately the shame, the searing shame on my person, of my actions.  I feel so weak and powerless, so out of control for having succumbed to something, anything, to mask my inner torment.  For, if you didn't know, or hadn't looked it up on Wikipedia, I am the Universal King of Self-Control.  I don't do anything, say anything, even think anything unless I am 100% sure of the outcome on the other end.  I avoid all things, all intoxicants, all stupefiants, all risks that I might lose the control I have exercised so greatly on myself, my family, my wife and my work.  But mostly, I have tried to control the horror I've felt inside seeping out.  I've always felt that should I even let out a little of what's inside, it will all come out at once, out of control and spew my toxic venom allover everything and everyone... 


So I am an addict.  A control addict.  Of the most cliché persuasion.  Born into a drug addicted, sexual abusing, raging and alcoholic home, I've grown up into a marginally functional grown man, who's survived surprisingly well for the tools I've acquired.  That last little bit of self-validation, while important, does but cause a tiny ripple of positivity in the sea of crushing despair I feel on the inside.  Pithy and self-absorbed?  Of course!  But I don't really know any other way...