Today, I was afraid. I was afraid of catastrophic things happening in my life. Today, I could see them taking shape. I could see myself not being up to the task of keeping them away. I could see part of me not wanting to be up to the task and in fact inviting that terrible fate as a way of telling myself I wasn’t afraid of it. But I was. And I am.

I’ve been burned and burdened and scared. I’ve been chased out of confidence and savvy and into a hole where I licked my wounds and hoped no one would find me. I’ve run away to a place of hopes and more hopes and truly desperate hopes. I’ve run away to see the look on my loved one’s faces as they too felt my fear and tried to make the best of it with me and to me. I’ve seen them suffer. I’ve seen them be heroic. And I’ve felt my heart not only sink but die. I’ve felt myself become paper, ash, empty and ghost-like. I’ve felt myself fade to fear and to despair. And there is no greater terror now for me now than that of possibly experiencing that again.

And yet the possibility of self-destruction looms, day-to-day, week-to-week. I see and feel it. It would seem I should control it, put it completely at bay and yet to do so feels not like something I’m even capable of doing. I’m like Charlie Brown knowing disaster looms if he kicks the football, but still trying it. I keep making the same mistake. Why?

Is it that I crave risk? I don’t think so. I don’t want to jump out of airplanes. I’ve never wanted to do anything even remotely like that. I know exactly what I want to do in life and it’s as sedentary as it gets!

In fact, I’ve known forever what I want out of life, but have still spent years fighting the world because it always seemed to make what I wanted difficult for me to attain, the main of it being my family’s issues seeming to always intrude on the peace and comfort I needed to concentrate on what I wanted to do. Peace here means several things but mostly it means not having the drama of other people’s problems, not having to jump because of someone else. All my life I’ve had to do that.

What does it all mean? It means I need the people in my life but I need them differently than I seem to get them. I need them to not need me so much or to not be so damned needy all the time in and of themselves.  I swear I would’ve killed to have a family of people who were happy just doing what they did and who could leave me alone to do what I did.

So I guess what I fear more than anything is myself. I function in the day-to-day world connected to people in a way I never like and never have liked. People need me which I hate. I don’t hate them, but I absolutely despise being needed. And I know why. My mother had emotional needs that she took from me when I was too young to deliver them, so I’m scarred. That is my baggage.

I will move forward with this knowledge and try to make the best of, trying to integrate what I want with what I have to do. Each step is a struggle, but I don’t see any other thing to do.

For the longest time I’ve had this odd thing where I’ve gotten actually sick to my stomach when I hear music by a certain band. It’s a rock band from the 70s, to be specific mostly famous in the mid-70s. I don’t dislike their music at all so I can only conclude that my sickness when I hear it is a result of something deeply psychological.

I’ve thought about this for years. What could be the cause? Well, today I think I got a clue. For whatever reason my feelings about the band and the nausea it gives me seem to revolve around another thing I did at the time, that was to drive (I was 16) from my house downtown to buy comic books at a particular store. To get there I’d park my car in a lot not too far away. I’d put the quarters in the meter and go and get my books. I’d buy the comics, come back to the car, get in it as I read. And these are important moments for me. Sitting there I absorbed stories about superheroes but I also read about male-female relationships. I was, in my way, growing up.

Now certainly I was still being childlike in wanting to remain safe, apart and enveloped in a world of comic books. I believe that my need for safety came from a large amount of insecurity deriving from my mother. Money was always tight and unhappiness and tension always prevalent. My flight into my own world had a lot to do with my wanting to separate from that world and from my mother. In essence I wanted to define her as the cause of it. It was easier that way. It made me clean and made me have a vision of my future as safer and more secure.

But with that came guilt. I think my nausea at the music of this band has somehow to do with that guilt which magnified what is I suppose the more typical guilt of growing up and away from your parents. I was not only leaving my mother, I was jettisoning her. I feel guilty not only for my bad attitude towards her but the fact that I think I adopted my own version of her craziness, really I think her depression.

I think my nausea is a reminder of kind of a step into madness that I am still living with, a depressed state of terror, fear and fantasy that I want still to leave.

Well, obviously I can’t do anything about them. They’re both dead. But I can and have to do something about me. I’m alive. I think. Seriously I have to do something to get healthier and of course getting therapy is part of it. I’ve done that and it’s helped but it doesn’t often help enough. I think any therapist would say that as well. That’s why they prescribe anti-depressants, at least mine have. But there’s more you have to do. You have to face things.

I’m angry and I still feel like acting out. But who is there to act out to? My mother’s not here so I can’t “show her” now can it? And, yes, I know it seems ridiculous to even say that.

What is it that keeps pressing me to do things that are not in the common sense best interest of my life? Who am I trying to piss of or impress? Who am I acting out for? God? Seriously? I really don’t know, but I know I’m still doing it. I know I still have stupid, bad feelings over things that I have no control over. I know I still put out my identity on sports teams. I know I need so much from the world to make me feel better. I know I’ve made decision after decision based on a model I now see as flawed and now I’m living with the decisions. I feel trapped but I still work at ways to spring myself from the trap. I still hope. But I live in quiet desperation.

This is an awful, awful thing, but it’s also a very good one, because what I feel now is honest and real. But I hate how it feels. I hate how honest feels when you realize just how underwater you are. I know how I got there and I have some clues about getting out but my odds to do so are long. There is no time for the long haul and I can’t do the long haul anyway.

I’m in pain and I’m looking for a way out rather than to acknowledge the pain and just live with it. I can’t in fact live with it without a sense that it will be gone tomorrow because of what I do today.

I have big dreams. I think now they came from big hurts.

That remain.

Why does it still affect me so? I guess it was the revelation (as much to myself as the outside world) of my fallen status, of what I had been vs. what I was. In that moment I revealed that I was once a golden boy who had become dross (at least in my own estimation). These are perhaps what link all my horrible moments that still affect me, the sense of my loss of worth.

These are cruel feelings I must tell you. I thought of suicide several times rather than live in the status the world had accorded me. I didn’t act (aren’t you lucky?) on it, but I think even if I had it would have been to act out. I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to world to know how seriously angry and unhappy I was. But I soldiered on instead. Much of my life has been soldiering on.

So I guess these moments, these old moments, still affect me because they remind me of something that is still a persistent partner: my loss of esteem. My self-worth hangs still by a thread ready to be crushed by the next job I lose or the next incurable disease I get (I haven’t had one… I’m just kind of making a point).

I long to reach a point where I’m not scared, where I don’t feel insecure. I guess that’s really really what it comes down to. My self-worth was and is associated with security. When that was challenged back when, so was my self-worth. I never became “bad” enough to have self-worth not measured in material goods and a decent home and health (or health insurance). I never could be bad enough not to care what people thought. Maybe it would’ve been better for me if I had.

Until you dispense with the terror of your life, it will revisit you.

Let me tell you why. I grew up on denial. In fact, I had so much denial and pretty much turned it into a lifestyle, or, perhaps better put, an energy that has driven me since. Now, let’s put that in perspective. Denying death leads to Christianity, doesn’t it? So let’s just say denial isn’t just a silly thing. It’s a monumentally crazy thing. But it’s really, really had to avoid. I certainly didn’t.

But I had to use denial. I couldn’t survive without it. Literally.  I had everything taken away from me as a kid, an entire life that was shown to me and then ZIP absconded with by those nasty fates. No point in sweating the details. Let’s just say I got screwed really badly and left to twist in the wind for my entire childhood, to live in fear and hopelessness and, you guessed it, denial.

The denial of course was to deny that what was so troubling me all the time, this terrible reality I lived with, was really real. I put it away, what I knew to be true, and what I couldn’t put away, what I threw in my mom’s face she put away for me. She slammed it back down on me with her own fear and her own denial. And, to be fair, my dad did, too. He just spun along with his own little fantasy and denied he had messed up super, colossal big time. I mean seriously big time. If I told you what my dad did, what unbelievably arrogant and short-sighted and horribly selfish things he did, you would practically wet yourself. He screwed himself, my mother and his kids simply for his pride. He knew it, too, later, but, you know, that was later.

So I was left to fend in a world that I was no longer really a member of. It’s hard to define that but look at it like this. I was bred into the upper-middle class intelligentsia and then thrown to the poverty line. Voila! Smartest and most educated guy on welfare! Well, not quite but close. And so I denied. Wouldn’t you? You would, don’t deny it.

Funny things happened and still happen as a result. I act weird sometimes and get mad a ridiculous things because I’m so used to not getting mad at the things I should. How do you though get mad at mom and dad when there’s no alternative? How do you survive when sense isn’t being used by anyone around you? Really. I’m not kidding. No one in my family seemed to grasp the simple concept of doing the sensible thing. I tried to say sensible was right and was slammed for it because sensibility hurt too much.

It turned me into what I am now, which is a mad fighter pilot riding my abilities over a deep gorge which, if I fall into, will take my life, my heart and my soul. I’m flying on fumes and hoping they last.

It’s an insane life and I don’t deserve it. I deserved sense and peace. My parents couldn’t give that to me and so here I am now trying to give it to my kids and probably failing. But that’s what I’m looking to reach on the other side: the land of peace.

There was a song we used to sing in grade school chorus which I loved so much. I know why now. Here wer the lyrics:

Waters ripple and flow
Swiftly flow to the sea
Bring my freedom to me
Set my spirit free
River flowing past
Give me liberty at last

The miserable know a spiritual when they hear it.

Not all that long ago I was visiting with my cousins and they brought up that my mom would always have been jealous of any woman I liked. I took that not as cute but as a bit harsh. They were implying my mom was over-possessive which she was, yet as I say that I hear voices screaming inside me to calm down that thinking. My mom was no more possessive than another.

My mom divorced my father and never really had another serious relationship until she remarried my father 11 years later. The 11 years were my childhood and coincidentally the time between when the child support began and ended. When I turned 18 my mom remarried my dad claiming she could trust him again. I’m not sure what to make of that. Yes, there were finances involved but I’m sure there was more. The point is I guess that my mother, the most important adult in my life as a child, has remained a constant partner, an enigma and a terror. I find myself worried about her, trying to be supportive of her, craving her love. I find myself at war about her as I once was at war with her.

Lately I’ve been feeling bad about that. Lately I’ve been thinking I should’ve been stronger, more gentle, more of an adult when I was with her. But today sitting here I realize that was the problem. Really, that was the problem. My mom treated me as an adult. Not completely mind you, but in an emotional way. I got to see her be afraid. I once got to see her weep openly and pitifully about how lonely she was. I can think of so many times going into her bedroom and seeing her play cards on the bed. And how afraid I was. I was afraid because mom was law but she was law that didn’t make sense. Every time I looked at her I felt the world could collapse, or was collapsing. I felt insecure because it couldn’t work. Our lives couldn’t work with my mom as she was. She didn’t have a job. She didn’t date men that made sense.

I think my mom was a child, and when I get angry with myself about how I treated her it is because I feel like I was hurting a child by hurting her. And I’m afraid.

I’m afraid that I, too, rely on my looks to get by and the way I can make people feel better. I fear that as I age and my attractiveness wears off this will change. I fear I’ll be bitter and become self-righteous and possessive of kids that I want to treat me as they once did.

I’m afraid I’ll be my mother.

Now, I’m not saying he’s right. In fact, I don’t think he was right at all. I think psychiatry and psychology are extremely valuable professions and practitioners of the field do a lot for people. Also the TV character saying this was actually dead when he said it. Literally. He was a ghost. So you have to kind of take that into consideration.

But what he said has stayed with me. Not that psychiatry or psychology is nonsense. But the other part about taking responsibility.

Lately I’ve had this over-riding sense that I’ve been wrong about a lot of things. Not immediate things, but things in the past. And I have to modify that by saying I may well be wrong about several things in my present as well, but I prefer to deal with them in the past because it’s easier. I think. I suppose if I look into my past and see things differently, then I can look at the present and apply those lessons to make better decisions moving forward.

So, let’s look back. I think now I was wrong to be so mad at my mother. Okay, so you all don’t know the details of that so much… Well, my mom divorced my dad for cheating on her and basically just lying through his teeth about tons of stuff. After he got caught and she kicked him out, he wanted to be forgiven and be let back into her graces and the family but she would not do it, and she would not do it, to use the popular vernacular, “with extreme prejudice”. That’s why I was mad at her. Mostly because she wouldn’t relent, but also because she was so freaking mad at my dad all the time.

I always saw her as the reason my family was not united. And it was true. Of course it was my dad’s fault first, but I didn’t see that. I knew it but I didn’t feel it. My mom could’ve forgiven my dad, but—and here’s the thing I’ve come to better understand with time—she couldn’t forgive him. She wasn’t able to. The feelings gnawed at her too much to allow her to live with herself if she forgave him. That’s what I didn’t understand at the time, her inability to move beyond the pain, the loss of trust and the hurt to her ego. And that’s the thing she didn’t tell me either because it wasn’t healthy for me to know that or possibly because she couldn’t articulate it without feeling the weight of it. I think she lived in that fragile a world.

And as a result, I have ever since. But I can change. And the first thing is to sympathize with her and be her friend and supporter, even though she’s long gone, because then I can begin to better sympathize with myself. See. I think as I cut myself off from my mother, the person who raised me, I cut myself off from the reality of myself.

How did I do it you ask? Obsession. Better than Calvin Kline even. I thought about my weight every day, practically every minute of every day. I checked it constantly, almost hourly. The point was that it dominated my life. And the reason it dominated my life was the reason it was ultimately successful (plus the fact that at 25 you can do things with your body that are a bit harder as you age). And it dominated my life because I saw it in almost personal sanity terms. I was convinced my life was out of control and being thin was the only way I could prove to myself that I was in control.

Now, I’ve written about weight loss before and all that stuff still stands. But I wanted to talk a little more specifically here about the positive side of it. That is the work aspect of it, as if I was a doctor writing a nifty new diet book. I don’t think diet books work. They didn’t for me. Weight Watchers did when I was 15, but only so far and it didn’t last because I stopped going and stopped following it. So it wasn’t Weight Watchers’ fault per se. My point is that a diet regimen that works is one that you create and maintain because it is from you, it’s an element of your personality.

Mine worked for me due to obsession and a need for control. As my life got more in control my weight issues returned, not quite as bad as they had been since I did manage to maintain a pretty regular exercise regimen. That’s the one thing that has remained a part of me. I like to exercise, now mostly on a standalone bike. But I put in 45 minutes 3-4 days a week and that keeps me in the ballpark even as my weight fluctuates up to 190+ at times. So in a nutshell the food issues are still there but I’m kind of controlling them, at least insofar as they don’t get too out of bounds. I look decent and that’s pretty much okay.

But for me to lose weight again as I did once, I’d need to leave my wife. I could not live in the military mode it took me to get thin and still be in a family. It’s unfortunate really and part of me dislikes this, but it’s quite true and there’s little to be done about it. But it brings me to the larger point about weight loss. It’s not just about you. It’s your family, your kids, your mom… It’ your life. No diet book will change the life that makes you fat. And I don’t think even you can change the life that makes you fat. I do think you can leave that life or declare to it that it is not helping you and you need to absolve yourself from it. That may work. But that’s the hardest part of all, divorcing your family, at least to the point where they know you are never going to be the person that you used to be because that person is not acceptable to you. They will take it personally because, well, they should. But those who really love you will understand. Those who need you more than love you will not.

Most of use live with people who need us more than love us. These people will not set us free to be what we ourselves wish to be. They will not offer the support because they have never taken such a step themselves and do not and dare not understand it. Accordingly you will have to suffer the work all by yourself. So my diet plan to you is to recognize that no one in your life is good enough for you.

It sounds ridiculous I grant, but the larger point is you will not succeed without changing the rules and the game and the playing field. And the people who love you will generally never help because to them the path you are on is an inherent rejection of them and their lives. It actually isn’t but they will not see it that way since the courage you are showing is something that scares them more than life itself.

It is something we are capable of, to change our lives, and acts of heroism abound in our history. So many more though exist than we will ever know since so many of us have done unknown things, like lose weight, leave an abusive partner, and more. We can do life-changing things, but the trick of it is ultimately that we not only have to change our lives, we have to also own them. We have to have that point of view, that vision of our world that will sustain us day in and day out in order to make that new self a permanent thing. That doesn’t happen often perhaps unless it has to.

Change is hard. Real change is harder. Total change is impossible because on the other side of possibility is a change so great that it is impossible to see its result.

In 1978 I heard this song with different ears and remembered things that had come before. When I first heard these tones, guitar strings and simple voices, I was a younger, fresher though far more screwed up (in many ways) person. But I had choices and options before me, with happiness and struggle and confusion to come. And the song brought me memories of years earlier, of childhood, of Saturdays, color, model ships, Halloween, harvests, sunshine and blue sky.

Now as I listen today each note holds a concentration of two sets of memories, one wrapped about the other. It is more delicious, like a finer wine but also leaves far more of an ache.

The song as I hear it now lifts me away easily from the present but in so doing makes coming back much harder. I don’t want to be here now it seems, here where I am and when I am. I want to be there, back there in the place that was.

But I really don’t.

The truth is even if I could find my way back to a moment of the past, it would be unsatisfying. There were never moments, any moments back then, to compare to how I feel about them in memory. That’s just the way life has been, at least for me. Magic has only ever existed for me in the anticipation and the memory of life, of moments which by themselves could not be magical because they were being lived through. The moments could be good of course, sometimes they felt great, but never were they magic, and so I assert magic never exists in reality. It exists in what was and what could be because each are completely safe. Every moment alive is a moment with death and the fear that brings. It manifests in a thousand different ways but all are essentially the same way to the exit door, to nothing.

I sit here now listening to 1978 which in and of itself is a memory of a time before it. My memory of 1978 is in itself a memory of 1966. And 1966… Well, I don’t know. It is simply a wash of sensation as befits a 7-year-old.

More and more the moments of my life seem meaningless and only important as they are tied by a hope or a memory. I find daily life so tedious and difficult. I act so much and seem to mean so little. I feel I am so far from being and acting myself day to day for fear of showing a face someone won’t like or fear. Perhaps I would feel the moments of pleasure if I did act like myself. Is that the secret? Do you know?

Perhaps. Perhaps you know what I don’t. Perhaps you understand how to be alive in each moment in a way I never have. If true, I hope to God you’ll tell me and tell me how to be like you.

I have never been in love except in expectation and nostalgia. Yes, there was once a we who were in love. Two of us. But it didn’t last the moments. I guess it never could and never would.

Though what if it is true the vulnerability is necessary and those of us way way way too afraid to expose our true selves never get that prize? This really fills me with sadness, or fills me with hope.

Sort of like everything.