Delusional involvement, annihilation and humiliation

My experience at this time is the enduring delusion that I am still involved in the situation with the ex and her new paramour and the house and her son and the cats and that whole life. It's as if the inertia of my narrative, my identity and my astonished outrage over the decisions she made ensnare me in complex nets, traps, obsessions and assumptions.

My morning meditations have been roiling, stormy, noisy and with only the barest flashes of silence or equanimity. Beset by what shallow fools like to call "negative emotions," I am even more woken up to the tensions and paradoxes that are established by this weird, ongoing delusion of attachment and involvement.

This passage is reminding me in newly conscious ways of just how difficult letting go, retreating, changing to a new situation and all of those forms of releasing and getting into non-action are for me. I am an engager, codependent in the extreme-- I go out to encounter and my first and overriding impulse is to get into shit with people in order to have a sense of myself.

My AA home group, for example, gradually became fixated on trying to prevent profanity during shares (it's a ticket meeting, so when your ticket is called you go up to the podium-- some of the guys in this men's group have been fucking cursing up a motherfucking storm of shitty fucking language, and some of the *other* guys find it offensive). I missed the group conscience about this issue last night, thankfully, since it is a pet peeve of mine. I find it hilarious when AA members who have acknowledged unmanageable life try to fucking police the speech of other recovering people. A newcomer who hits this meeting now will just be pushed back into some of that old thinking about a). how fucked up he is because he swears and b). how AA is a prissy fucking Rotary Club substitute for people with shallow moral codes dedicated to superficial measures of spiritual progress.

Can you tell, dear reader, that this issue ought to be on the 4th step I am currently putting together? I can tell.

Anyway, in spite of having to work until after the group conscience, when I arrived at the meeting someone told me that the topic had been how to get guys to stop fucking swearing like motherfuckers, and I got *into it* immediately. Thin-skinned and engaged, right away. Stuck in my close minded position and feeling indignant.

This is how I am wired in my default setting. I ENGAGE. I get in there. I go in without any sort of plan or equanimity of any kind.

This tendency to GET INVOLVED has of course served me extremely well in many ways. But I am finally sensing that it is also some old and tired and tiring strategy that could use moderation at least.
Ultimately, I really don't care about whether guys can "drop the F bomb" (how fucking juvenile) from the podium or not. The underlying issues for me go to the superficiality of the moral upbringing and hypocrisy in which I was raised. When I get down to that and look at primary causes, I'm sure I'll get some liberation from the impulse to shock, confront, belittle the sensitivities of others, etc.

More germane to the unsought uninvolvement (disinvolvement?) from my former life, which of course is a powerful driver for old habits and old strategies: the facts of the matter are that I am NOT INVOLVED. For someone whose landscape is contingently determined, NOT BEING INVOLVED contains within it the threat of annihilation. Of course, this is how delusions operate. In spite of NOT BEING INVOLVED, for the moment I still exist. So the clamor within myself that claims that I have been annihilated is strictly delusional.

Reality is clear. What is no more is no longer operating in reality. Like death, all loss is loss only for those who remain. If I could NOT REMAIN ENGAGED, there would be no loss in the present moment, since what I am experiencing as loss simply is no more-- it is over, gone, does not exist anywhere at all except in my engagement. My holding on is driven by self-centered fear which activates so many of my other old habits and failed strategies. I keep pressing the lever looking for the old payoffs. None of those old payoffs are forthcoming. The sense of futility and consequent helplessness, embarrassment, humiliation and rage are narrow passages. When the suicidal fantasy kicks in, as it is still doing a few times a day, it is usually in the midst of this transcendent feeling of humiliation and its attendant bitter shards of worthlessness, failure, incomprehension, anger and shock. 

(the link leads to the interesting website, Emotional Competency, which at the very least has an encouraging name).

It all points to my least favorite tarot image, a card I dread in readings more than any other. I used to resist archetypes of The Emperor, or Death, or The Tower, or some of the heavier minor arcana. But the real challenge for me now is definitely the 5 of swords.