Holding Myself Back

I did something I don't normally do in a relationship.  I talked about something that was on my mind.  It didn't turn out the way I believed, at the time, that it would.  To be honest, I don't know how I could possibly think it would turn out differently.  My ability with denial and my penchant for self-deception must be extraordinary. 
I thought it would be a good idea to ask the woman I was seeing what we were, in her eyes.  I asked her what she thought we would become.  The conversation began to take a rather painful turn that left me crying in her car, swimming in a sea of extremely confusing emotions, and her attempting to comfort me before I got out of the car to possibly never see her again.  I don't know that I believed for a second that that would be how the day would turn out.  The thing that is really getting to me is that the reason I was left in that state is because I have this belief that I will not be getting married again and that I don't want children.  I believe this to my core. 

Or I did.

I called my mom that night.  In talking to her I felt, for the first time in a quite a while, the hole that seems to sit right at heart level.  It is the physical manifestation of some serious emotional shit.  I am empty, on some level, and I believe it is this emptiness that has me thinking that marriage and kids are not for me.  For some time now, I have been pigheadedly (I know, surprising) thinking that I knew what I would want for the rest of my life.  Now, thanks to this woman and my mother, I am taking another look at myself. 
What is kind of interesting to me is that on the very day where I declared my independence from the institution of marriage to a woman who is very into the idea, we had been talking about how I don't know shit.  How can I possibly know what I will want?  At the same time I ask that, I remember what I think about marriage.  Which then leads me to wonder if the reason I am second guessing myself is because not being able to see her is really painful.  I don't know what I wanted to come from talking about this stuff with her, but I know now that I definitely did not want to be where I am right now.  And of course I begin to analyze and over analyze this pain in my chest that was left when she pulled out of my drive way because of something I said. 
There is a part of me that wants to call her right now and talk it out and be happy.  Then there is the part of me that knows me well enough to keep me from doing that while in the state of mind I am in.
I have been looking at our relationship and examining all of the things I didn't do that I could have done to perhaps change my way of thinking.  If I had opened up a bit more to her and let her in a bit more.  If I had just held her hand and let myself enjoy that very simple act.  If I had allowed myself to feel something with her, then it would all be just fine.  The "what ifs" are waltzing through my brain.
But that's the thing.  I didn't do those things.  The thought of opening myself up is so riddled with anxiety that I wonder how I will ever be able to do it again.  My last attempt, as misguided as it may have been, with love has left me so gun shy that I refuse to answer the door if I even think that it is knocking.  I am the quivering dog under the bed, pissing myself because I am so scared of the storm that I won't face it.  Once again, fear is in control. 

I am in the way of myself.

I used to think I was fearless in love.  Not true.  I am so wrapped up in my defenses that I was always protected.  Now I have wrapped myself even tighter.  I am actually concerned that I won't ever get out. 
I am a child in a man's body.  Fear is my Bogey man, hiding in the closet where I keep my love.

So, now I begin to question myself again.  What do I want?  I mean really want, not what do I want so that I am protected and safe.  What do I want?

Use Your Words

I am still stuffing the emotions.  It is fear that makes me do it.  I don't want to hurt anyone and I don't want to be an asshole.  I don't want to be seen as.....what?  Who I am?
This not talking about things, because of fear makes me a coward when all I really want is to be a nice guy and to do the right thing.  But what is that?  What is this right thing that I seem to be in an eternal search for?  Maybe Lenny Bruce was right, there is no good or bad.  It's just what cooks for me.
All in all, I have been in a good place.  Time to myself and time to heal are what I have needed, and still need.  The things that would have knocked me down for two or three days no longer last more than a few hours.  There is some happiness in doing things and seeing people and in the mundane.  I am getting better and I have learned a few things along the way, but it seems that old habits die hard.  What is it about emotions and feelings that are so difficult?  Is it the revealing of yourself, of what goes on behind the eyes?  Is it the vulnerability that arises because you let someone see a piece of you and now they can now hurt you?
I suppose the answer would be yes to all of those.

A friend has mentioned that men are not meant to be emotional creatures. 
He may be on to something. 
Men are meant to be strong and protective.  Emotions are weak and boys are taught this at an early age.  If you fall and hurt yourself, you had better not cry.  Kids get this idea of emotional blockage from somewhere.  I know my dad would spout "I will give you something to cry about" if he saw tears when I was being punished. 
As a little kid, what are you supposed to do with that? 
Apparently, learning to ignore and stuff and hide are what you do with it. 
As boys, we learn from our fathers.  I have only seen my father cry once, and that was one tear.  How else can that be processed besides that men must be strong.

As I write those words I feel the tears welling up.  They well up from the pain that still sits in my chest, in that place where I locked everything up from years ago.  The emotions that I stuffed away never went away.  They never do.  Writing about these things helps; talking about them helps.  But they sit there still. 
I wonder if my time with therapy has been so dragged down by talking about the current events that are fucking with my head, the things that won't leave me alone, that the things I need to be seeing are able to hide in the shadows of the colossus that developed over the past year and a half. 
It's like I am trying to carve my statue and someone keeps putting stone where I have found a shape.
Part of me would really like to smack that person.  Yes, it is easier to clear away the debris they leave behind, but it is still very annoying.  The real kicker is that, if I were to resort to violence, it would be more acceptable than if I were to cry about it. 
Being a man means that aggression is okay.
Maybe it stems from evolution of man from primate, or whatever, to being what we are today.  Maybe that is why men aren't supposed to be emotional creatures, but baring our teeth is expected.  It is not as acceptable as it may have once been, but you know how it is - boys will be boys.  And even as I say that, I wonder what is going to happen as society progresses.  Men being overly aggressive is no longer as accepted as it once was.  There are no duels when we have been hurt.  Hauling off and hitting a guy will land you in jail or in a law suit.  And still, being over emotional is seen as weak.  What are we going to do with all of this pent up emotion?

It all comes out eventually.  If you don't deal with it right away, you will later and it will be so much bigger.  All of mine came out at my wife in a tsunami of bi-polar emotional ups and downs that left me sobbing on the floor and her alone.
It all comes out one way or another.
If I have learned one lesson, that would be it.  Now I just need to get it into my stupid head that I need to talk about it before it is too much.  I don't want to scream at anyone else.  I don't want to get lost again.  The advantage I have now is that I know what the answer is - use my words before I get to the point where I want to lose my mind.

Deep Water Flailing

It is a challenge to stay away from old habits.
Getting lost inside my head almost feels like a dream sometimes.  When I realize I am doing it again, there is a moment of clarity when I can yank myself out and into the world in the moment.  I take in the objects around me.  I remind myself to stay here, in reality.  It is very much like waking and trying to remember where you are.
And to think, I have spent most of my life inside my head. 

It is terrible during a conversation when I catch myself wandering off to far away thoughts.  I have grown fairly adept at responding to the appropriate moments, but I am not always fully into what is being said.  The lull of driving tends to start the movie in my head as well.  I am off thinking about things that have happened or that I wish would happen.  This fantasy world of mine, this place where I relive events or have conversations I should be having with real people gives me just enough freedom to survive in this world, the physical world.  But I am missing out on things that are really happening.
It kind of makes me sad, in a couple of ways.
My tendencies toward melancholy and nostalgia usually bend my thoughts toward those things that have happened which are sad or that I miss.  I run over the events time and time again, which I can't imagine is healthy and it doesn't change anything.  We can only move forward.
I don't know what is passing me by in the real world.  There are so many things going on all around us that getting lost in what goes in inside our heads lets the good stuff, the real stuff, pass us by.  It is kind of like the weak swimmer flailing around in the deep end of the lake without direction when being able to touch the bottom and enjoying the water is only a few feet away.  I don't know that many of us are strong swimmers when it comes to life.  So why would I choose to splash around in the enormity of the deep water that is my mind?  Doing so stirs up the mud and it becomes harder and harder to find the shallows where I can stand easily.  All I have to do is take a few strong kicks and I can stand on solid ground and enjoy the water all around me.  It's not easy when I am so used to flailing that it seems like swimming.  It's not easy when all that flailing has left me blind to where the solid ground remains. 
I have found two things that help me, meditation and acting.  To do either successfully you have to be in the moment, observing what is happening.  If you get lost in your head, the pieces won't fit.  When I pull myself out of my thoughts and worries and fears and fit myself into the moment as it is happening the meditation feels right and the acting feels natural.  They are reminders of what I should be doing all the time.  They are my water wings, I guess.

The mind is a vast place.  A practiced explorer may be able to view it, and all of the fears and doubts and what-ifs that live there, but even they only observe those things.  The things that live in the mind are not real unless we make them real.  The untrained mind brings to life a Frankenstein of all of the things we hide from.  It is a scary place.  By working on facing the fears and dealing with the apparitions that fill the vision behind my eyes, it is becoming less so.  Finding reasons for actions and the causes to the effects makes the water less muddy.  I begin to see a little more clearly and the more I try the deeper I will be able to see.  I would love to be able to dive into my mind and come out lying on my back, floating on the surface where the beauty and comfort that it could hold can surround me below and the sun and warmth can fill my body and vision above.  I'm not there yet, but there is hope.  The hope is what keeps me warm for now.


"It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by demons, heaven or hell."

Emptying Emotional Cache

Talking about things not only clears them out of your mental/emotional cache, but it allows questions to arise which have potential to answer the questions you didn't know were there.
I have recently been talking to friends about Jill.
Talking about her has brought up a question for me about when I began my emotional shut down.


I met her when I was 18 and in Cancun with my grandparents.  As fate would have it, I met her on my last night there, but we exchanged addresses and sent each other letters for a while.  When I moved to Maryland I found her picture with her email address.  I took a shot in the dark and we began to talk again.  We met up for a friend's wedding and then another and another.  We talked almost every night on the phone or email.  The fact that she lived in Michigan was challenging for a number of reasons.  The obvious would be that the physical distance was hard when I wanted to see her.  Because of this I offered to move to Michigan, or wherever she went, to be with her.

It is important to note that the enormity of this notion has been made all the more apparent by the realization my therapist helped make recently.  I have an almost irrational aversion to being defined by a relationship.  Moving to be with her was a big deal for me.
I can't pretend that she was a perfect woman or that it would have been a perfect relationship, though I have held on to that little fantasy for a long time.  What I do know is that we laughed a lot and were naturally comfortable around each other.  Apparently, this is pretty important in a relationship.

Long story short, she ended it over New Years Eve 2000 when she didn't answer my call that night or any night following.  It was especially hard to get over her because I never had any closure.  My heart had been broken and I didn't know why.  It took me a really long time to get over her because of this.  I emailed her a year or so later and she said that she felt I had lied to her about a friendship of mine, which I actually hadn't (believe it or not), and that she didn't need that in her life.  To this day I can't say that I am completely past all of the heart ache.  If I were I wouldn't still be affected by what happened or didn't happen.
I feel a little crazy because I still think about it.  I should have moved on and forgotten about the whole thing, but I haven't.  The little romantic part of me would still like to see her again.  The rational part of me knows how stupid that is.  She affected me.

Following Jill were two more women that broke my heart in big ways.  The only one that didn't was Hannah.  She was the one that I hurt.  She was the unwitting recipient of my emotional baggage coming out in a big way.  She was also the woman who lived with me in spite of the fact that I was as emotionally available as a stone. 
I had found comfort in being selfish after Jill.  I had women who flirted with me and wanted to be with me, but I was having too much fun not feeling anything for anyone.  It didn't really occur to me that I may have been hurting people.  I don't know that I would have cared much if I had known.  I basked in the ego that followed the one night stands.  I held the power.  I could sleep with a woman and move on and they couldn't hurt me.  It was physical.  It was easy.  It was simple.  I spent a few years building my walls to keep people away.
I feel like shit that the woman who took the brunt of that all crashing down was a woman who really cared for me.  What seemed like the perfect set up turned into the perfect storm.

I see myself falling back into some of the old habits again.  There is a part of me that likes the idea of being that guy who sleeps around and doesn't worry about those bothersome emotions.  Then there is the part of me that is no longer 23.  I know I can't really do that anymore.  I don't know that I am even capable.  I don't have any desire to be in a serious relationship right now, which is good seeing as I am the emotional equivalent to Chernobyl. 

It is weird to think how people will affect us.  There is no way of knowing what sort of impact that smile or those eyes or a laugh or scent will sit in our memory years after meeting someone.  I suppose being mindful of this is important when we first shake hands.  We affect each other.

I don't like how much I have allowed the Jill situation to control me.  She did a number on me, but that is no excuse to shut down like I did.  It is important to take time after a failed relationship to heal, but to allow it to affect every other relationship following is....well, dumb.  I wish that after writing this I would be able to just say that I could drop it all and lesson learned.  I don't know that that will happen, sad to say.  I do feel like writing about it has helped me to see what I need to be working on.
All this being said, I wonder what happened that put me in a place where I would allow the heart break from a few women drastically affect me like it has.
Another question raised.

Self-Indulgent Anger

I have never been good with anger.
It has always been an ugly black feeling that never seems justified, though I suppose there are times when I should have been angry and wasn't.  Anger is said to be healthy, but I have always felt bad about being angry with someone, like they wouldn't like me or would be disappointed in me if I were angry at them.  Thanks to this unhealthy view of my own natural emotion, it has been shoved down into the depths time and again.  Unfortunately for anyone who has ever pushed my buttons to the point of explosion, this means that when I do get angry it comes with a mushroom cloud.  Thankfully, most people know that when I say "hey, this is pissing me off" they should stop and they do.  I wonder, though, if I am the only one who feels the fall out.

The guilt that follows the anger is deep and drowning.  The last time I lost my temper to the point of screaming and red face left me curled on the floor sobbing.  That was a time when my anger was justified, albeit a bit extreme.  I don't know that anyone deserves to be screamed at, and I felt horrible.  At the same time, the other voice chimed in with "how many times do you poke the dog before you get bitten?"
Losing control like that has happened twice.  I pray it won't happen again and have begun working on ways to keep it from happening, like dealing with things now instead of later.  Temper explosions are like grenades filled with the shrapnel of everything unsaid.  In order to keep the collateral down, it is important to keep the ammunition to a minimum.  The craziest thing for me to think about is how many years of stuffing have been involved in this anger that stews inside me?  It is possible I had decades of unresolved emotions swirling in the abyss within me.

I don't get angry often, and I don't mean I control it well or ignore it.  I mean that most things just don't bother me all that much.  I told a friend that I had lost my temper before and I described what happened.  She was shocked.  It was hard to believe that this laid back dude would be capable of that.  So, to think about how long I must have been stuffing things down is kind of mental.
I am not trying to condone going off on everyone that pisses you off, but it is important to deal with things.  It is also important to look at the anger itself.  Buddhism teaches that anger comes from within, not from without.  When we get angry it comes from our unresolved fears or a damaged ego.  It is important to look at the anger and at yourself.  This can be very difficult.  The chance of finding something we don't want to see is scary.  But not looking at it doesn't make it go away and the longer it is there the more damage it can do.
The last time I blew up, I was afraid.  I was afraid I would never get out of the hole I had crawled into.  I was afraid that I would continue to allow this person to push me to places I didn't want to go, the places that had left me suicidal.  The places where I couldn't sleep in a bed by myself.  The places where I was punching walls and drinking to wash down the pills I was using to escape the things I was doing.  I was scared of those things.  I had allowed myself to continue to jump in front of this train time and time again.  I was weak.  I was hurting and I could see what I needed to get better.  I needed to be away from this person.  I blew up because I was afraid I wouldn't get there.
I was angry because I knew that I had allowed myself to get to this place.  There had been plenty of stops along the way where I could have gotten off and taken care of myself.  I chose not to.  Was I vulnerable?  Yes, but it was still my choice.  Sometimes I like to blame her even though I know that I am the only one who can control me.  I lost my temper when it all became too much and the fear and frustration boiled to the surface in a miasma of pain and frustration.
I was mad at her, sure.  But I was mostly mad at myself.

As I write this down I can feel some of the stress relax from my shoulders and neck.  My jaw loosens, slightly.  I have a lot of unresolved issues sitting inside me.  I am trying to look at them and deal with them.  It is a strange, revealing adventure and I have learned a few things.  Even anger requires some exploration and it is just as fascinating as looking at love or depression.

“Conquer anger by non-anger. Conquer evil by good. Conquer miserliness by liberality. Conquer a liar by truthfulness.” (Dhammapada, v. 233)

This Latent Emotion

As much as I have grown, there are bad habits that won't go away. 
I still struggle with shoving emotions down to deal with later, and though this is great at the time I am finding that the emotions won't stay hidden for as long as they would have in the past.  My Pandora's box has been opened and all of my demons are screaming from it's depths.  They tend to show up at the most inopportune moments. 
For example, with a lady this weekend.
What was fun-aggressive turned to a mix of negative emotions as I sat in my breath and sweat.  My thoughts reeled and I couldn't catch my breath and I couldn't hide my confusion.  Because she is who she is, she was kind and understanding and supportive.  It was what I needed at that time.  I wasn't ready to talk about everything I was feeling and she was okay with it. 
There is anger crouching over my shoulder.  I am not good with my anger.  This fact gives it power.  Instead of letting it out, I tend to rationalize it.  As civilized as this seems, it does me no good.  When I think of unleashing it I wonder how effective it would be when I couldn't even tell the person with which I am angry.  It would do no good.  It would be spitting in the wind.  On top of that, what good would it do to yell at the other people I am angry with?  I can't yell at myself without seeming insane or pulling off a fight club moment in some parking lot.  I can't blow up at my father.  I can't scream at the universe. 
I could, actually, but what good does it do?
So I write about it in hopes that the "page" will take these emotions and turn them into something else.  This is a first step to talking about it.  I did talk about it and in doing so I took some of its power away. 
The power of words.

I have lost the train for this post.  I think that dealing with some of these latent emotions is like digging up an old treasure.  I find a few coins, but most of it is still hidden and reveals itself in time.