Sickness unto death, or precarious angst, or abandoning ship when the ship is the self

I was emailing with a recovery friend of mine, a woman with whom I share a lot of the same maladjusted or at least misery-causing patterns and behaviors, and I recalled one of the hexagrams of the I Ching telling me, a long time ago, that my main sickness was that I took on the sickness of others. At the time, I had no idea what that meant. It seemed inscrutable and odd to me. 

It's from the Wilhelm translation of hexagram 25, Innocence or The Unexpected, line 5 (this from James DeKorne's online I Ching):

Wilhelm observes: "That he appears ill comes from his way of taking the illnesses of others upon himself.” This can refer to both other people in the outer world, or to "others" in the inner world of the psyche -- our autonomous drives, appetites, emotions, etc. The psychological concept of "co- dependence” often applies to this line.

I have reflected a great deal upon the magical powers of the soul of man, and I have discovered a great many secrets in Nature, and I will tell you that he only can be a true physician who has acquired this power. If our physicians did possess it, their books might be burnt and their medicines be thrown into the ocean, and the world would be all the more benefited by it. Paracelsus

A. Do nothing and things will improve by themselves.
B. You bear the illusions of others as if they were your own. Co-dependence helps nobody.
C. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

I have more insight into it now. 

It's a way I have of avoiding paying attention to myself. If you have an issue going on, I'll get wrapped up in it. It may seem to you and me and everyone involved that I am being helpful, and sometimes I guess I actually am. But usually it is just another form of abandoning myself. Of locating the center of who I am outside who I am. 

There are some shapes where the center of gravity is not on the shape itself, but out in space, away from the material from which the shape is made. 

This is often how it feels for me. The locus of control for me is external. Most often, it is centered in another person. I continue to exist, but only relative to the other person. 

Everyone is sick in some way. This seems to be the state of our species at this time. So if my center of gravity is located outside of me, in another person, the ways that person is dysfunctional, maladjusted, incapable of intimacy, emotionally damaged, in denial, suffering from post-traumatic symptoms or otherwise fucked up in all the standard human ways will become the ways I allow myself to be yanked around. 

Another way to think of it is my compass is turned toward a magnetic north that is not within myself, but in other people. This also provides a situation that is constantly disorienting of course because I can only get my bearings by checking with the other person. 

In CoDA, codependency is sometimes described as "taking someone else's temperature to see how you feel." This is a great metaphor. "How are you Percy?" "Well I don't know, how are you?" "I am really sad and upset." "Oh well then so am I!" 

The word "precarious" has a fascinating etymology. The contemporary definition: "not securely held or in position, dangerously likely to fall or collapse," with the secondary definition of "dependent on chance, uncertain." But the etymology shows the root of this idea of lack of security, liable to collapse or fall, shot through with constant uncertainty.

"precarious (adj.)

1640s, a legal word, "held through the favor of another," from Latin precarius "obtained by asking or praying," from prex (genitive precis) "entreaty, prayer" (from PIE root *prek- "to ask, entreat"). Notion of "dependent on the will of another" led to extended sense "risky, dangerous, uncertain" (1680s). "No word is more unskillfully used than this with its derivatives. It is used for uncertain in all its senses; but it only means uncertain, as dependent on others ..." [Johnson]. Related: Precariously; precariousness."

So according to Johnson, the unskillful use of the word of course won out for good. It figures. 

At any rate, the old-school and contemporary precariousness of my relationship life is based on this metaphor of the external locus of control. My happiness hinges on the decisions and choices of others. But, it turns out, my sickness or dysfunctionality or unhappiness or whatever you want to call hinges on the same thing. 

Another definition of codependency could be "a relationship life constituted by precarious reliance on the will, favor, attitudes, opinions or choices of others."

Of course, you can image the consequences of this dynamic, fairly easily. 

I recall realizing, early in sobriety, that my motto while actively drinking, using or otherwise being an addict was: "Anywhere but here, anytime but now, anyone but me." Nihilistic in the extreme, rooted in a kind of fear that was constantly bordering on terror. Obliterate me, any way you can. Blot me out. I hate myself and the only way to end that self-hatred is oblivion or death. It sounds melodramatic, but it is the basic principle by which I lived for 30 years.  

Now that I have been sober nearly 14 years, and now that I am facing the thermonuclear core of all addiction and compulsion for me, which is codependency, I realize I have continued to abandon ship at every opportunity. How do I feel? Well it depends on how you are acting. Do I feel lovable or loved? Well it depends on whether or not you are reassuring me (especially verbally) that I am lovable and loved. What do I want to do? Whatever makes you happy (that is, whatever seems like I could manipulate you into not abandoning me). 

This uncovers why I would repeatedly get intimately involved with unavailable women. Note that unavailable is a simple plain fact. I do not mean it in any judgmental way. On a geospatial level, distant. On an emotional level, either unable to respond to my emotions out of their own traumatic past or due to some urgent preoccupation that they have that is totally legit. Nevertheless, unavailable. Sometimes also, so deeply entangled in a network of other relationships that I'm de facto way at the bottom of the list. It's not personal, it's just business. 

Obviously, I am attracted to women in these categories because they provide the perfect opportunity for me to abandon ship, when the ship is myself. Look, I'm fucked up and on fire and sinking anyway, so I need some excuse to get the hell off. A perfect excuse is to re-enact the lack of love in my primal relationships over and over again, by trying to get unavailable women to show up for me. The other payoff is I get to feel abandoned all the time, since, in fact, I am abandoned. It's just that it is not the other person who is abandoning me, but me. Abandoning me. Ah, the comfort of the old familiar misery. 

Having been ghosted by A and now feeling caspered a lot of the time by the loml, I'm beginning to get weary of the old pattern. (By the way, it was the loml herself who provided the term "caspering" which is new to me. Basically, it's friendly ghosting-- never having time, replying to communication with hardly anything, almost always making it so I have to make contact first, disappearing for long stretches but not with any malice, etc.) I'm in that weird zone of still doing it to myself but sincerely wanting to stop. The repeated inability to stop always, with addiction, leads to "pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization," to use Bill W's piercing phrase. So, since I am continuing to struggle with this pattern, I can only guess it is a harbinger that I am at least closer to recovery than not. 

I like the thought of that. Most of the time, I am still in the position of just feeling pain. Loneliness, abandonment anxiety, self loathing, self judgment of being weak and pathetic, angry, furious even, at being gaslighted and caspered and ignored and held at arm's length. I keep saying to myself, well, just let go. Stop it. Try that Al-Anon thing:

"Get off of their backs, get out of their way, get on with your life."

Or this kind of flat out clear truth:

Even if that someone is me. 

250 square feet of pestilence

Crickets, termites, roof rats and fleas. Oh my. 

Those are the various charming life forms that either were or are keeping me company in Hades. Blood, boils, locusts, frogs and Republicans are probably next, knowing Arizona. 

I had tolerated the crickets for a long time because of the old symbolism of good luck. Then I decided fuck good luck, these bastards are depriving me of sleep and chewing on paper and whatever else. So I bought some sticky traps, baited them with cornmeal, and bought some molasses and made a bowl of molasses water. The sticky traps are supposed to be very effective, and the molasses water tempts them and they fall in and drown. Well, of course, as soon as I made that effort, all of the crickets magically disappeared. Not one has been caught in a trap or drowned in the molasses. They all just got woke af and took off. 

Apparently this little place has had a termite problem for years, on and off. I discovered two tunnels running down my inside walls and had no clue what they even were, never having dealt with termites before. "Hey what is this weird brown sandy line on the wall?" Crumbled it open-- little blind buggies running to and fro. Aha, very nice. So a "termite tech" is on the way. Turns out the anti-termite defense of last July is still under warranty. 

For the past couple of months, I have heard scampering, scrambling, lumbering life forms overhead. I thought maybe cats were getting into the crawlspace. Then I realized it is far more likely they are the weird Arizona pest, roof rats. Scientific name: Rattus rattus, which is cool. 

It strikes me as fairly typical of Maricopa County that the Tempe website has this: "Call the Maricopa County Vector number 602-506-6616 - hit 3 and report under the category of “Smoking automobiles and other environmental issues” And this: "Roof rats spend 90% of their lives 4 feet or more off the ground." An interesting image. 

Die, asshole

So inspectors are coming to exterminate all the Rattus rattuses, which, being a part time Jainist and full time hypocrite, I find regrettable, but fuck them. The rats, not the inspectors. What a job. 

Which leads to the rat fleas. A weird few fleas showed up about a week ago. At first, I was in a bit of a panic, because the first bites were in a straight line and fairly close together, a mark of bed bugs, toward which I have an intense phobia. I have never suffered an infestation of bedbugs, and I'm grateful for that, considering the amount of traveling I do and the number of hotels and motels I stay in. It's weird when one is actually relieved that the bites one sustains overnight are "only fleas." But I have heard horror stories of the lengths people have to go to get rid of a bedbug infestation, and I also just think they are disgusting, horrifying little creatures. 

I am not a great lover of fleas, either. But they are easier to get rid of. Anyway, wtf I asked myself. How did fleas get in here? Eventually I put two and two together and speculated that the fleas are from the roof rats. I did some research into that and, lo and behold, fleas are a common adjunct to being blessed with a roof rat colony. So I fogged the apartment and so far, it seems I eliminated the fleas, at least for now. Of course, I expect the roof rats still have them, and I imagine until the Rattus rattus are Rattus deadus, the fleas are bound to come back. Joy. 

So Percy's little jaunt through Hades has been blessed with all sorts of new and wonderful life. The miracle of the paradomestic wilderness. Partly a reflection of the very nature of Hades itself: hot and dry, to say the least, but irrigated by the glorious black Styx, so that the lack of a hard freeze every year makes swarms and plagues a likely outcome. It's supposed to be unpleasant to live here, but watering the desert makes it like a mega-breeding ground for vermin. Hooray. 

The charm just doesn't quit down here among the shades. 

Step 8

On my mind a lot lately:

"Made a list of all people we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all."

This is where my step work stalled out way back in maybe August. I had begun a painstaking process of "doing the steps" starting around October of 2016, via a very thorough and sometimes maddening workbook called Big Book Awakening.  A small group of men and I got together every Monday night for about a year and worked very slowly indeed through steps one, two and three out of that workbook. When we got to step 4, we split up into sponsor/sponsee dyads and we have never reconvened since. 

Step 4 hit me right around this time last year, with perfect timing. My resentments toward A and her new paramour were at their peak, as well as a lot of other obsessive and bitter thinking. I worked through 4 but didn't do step 5 until after the summer, and it took more than 9 hours stretched out over several nights. 

When I got to step 8, I hit a wall. Even in the face of so much thorough step work, the most in depth I have gone in the recovery process in 13 years, great solid walls of defense came up when I thought about putting A on the list of people I had harmed and becoming willing to make amends to her. The Big Book recommends we "ask until the willingness comes" when we are not willing, but I wasn't even willing to fucking ask for it. 

Mostly, the little poisonous mantra that went through my mind was "I didn't harm her at all. I was 100% victim." Again and again when I tried to turn my attention to this step regarding A, the door would simply slam shut. In fact, even looking in that direction summoned demons of resentment back to my chest, so I stopped trying. Time to put it aside. I just couldn't deal.

The Big Book, in step 4, takes us to the highest level of the inventory when it says that we put aside the wrongs others had done *entirely* and resolutely look for our own part. And in the step 8 and 9 section, the book has this passage: 

"The question of how to approach the man we hated will arise. It may be he has done us more harm than we have done him and, though we may have acquired a better attitude toward him, we are still not too keen about admitting our faults. Nevertheless, with a person we dislike, we take the bit in our teeth. It is harder to go to an enemy than to a friend, but we find it much more beneficial to us. We go to him in a helpful and forgiving spirit, confessing our former ill feeling and expressing our regret.

Under no condition do we criticize such a person or argue. Simply we tell him that we will never get over drinking until we have done our utmost to straighten out the past. We are there to sweep off our side of the street, realizing that nothing worth while can be accomplished until we do so, never trying to tell him what he should do. His faults are not discussed. We stick to our own. If our manner is calm, frank and open, we will be gratified with the results." 

Of course, the book also says: "We should be sensible, tactful, considerate and humble without being servile or scraping. As God's people we stand on our feet; we don't crawl before anyone."

The blunt fact is I do hate A. I hate her. It's difficult for me, especially raised as I was to be Mr. Nice Guy, to stare that stark flat out hatred in the face and admit it's in my heart. Getting honest with myself has probably been the most difficult part of sobriety. Finally, however, I feel willing to get rid of that hatred to the extent that is possible at this time, and I know from very powerful past experience that the way to get rid of that hatred is to make amends. 

It's typical how the self help movement sometimes harps on the necessity of forgiveness as a path to happiness and freedom, but often stops short of the concrete, tangible, observable actions that forgiveness often requires. I do not have to cultivate warm and fuzzy feelings toward A in order to forgive her. It has been very important to realize that *forgiveness is not a feeling*, I do not have to excuse her treatment of me. I do not have to agree to a continued relationship with her after the amends (which I doubt she would ask for anyway, but it is one of my fears). All I have to do is 1). identify my own wrongs and 2). make direct amends to her for my own wrongs, putting aside hers entirely. 

Forgiveness is real when the other person simply takes up less room in my head and heart. It's not a feeling and it's not related to justice. It is in fact absolutely removed from concepts of justice and mercy. It is simply the freedom from resentment. It is nonattachment. I can *try* to forget the wrongs someone has done me all I want, but forgetting those wrongs is unlikely and doesn't constitute forgiveness anyway. Because no matter how thorough the forgetting might be for stretches of time, unless I do the work, here comes the memory again. This is the very shape of resentment, which, after all, comes from the French resentir, which means "to feel again." And again. And again and again. Goddamn it, no matter how hard I try. So I am going to need a much more powerful set of tools than simply claiming not to give a shit about some asshat or other who fucked me over, or trying to be nice, or forgetting, or getting revenge, or hoping for justice, or pretending I have mercy. I am going to have to find a way to let the other person off the hook. Because when A is off the hook, then I will be off the hook. This is how I interpret that brief phrase in the so-called St. Francis Prayer: it is by forgiving that we are forgiven. And it turns out that making amends for my own wrongs without regard to hers is the way that *she* ends up off the hook. Because I am free in the situation then. I have done my level best to right the wrongs I have done. And in that *action*, which is why the book says "direct amends," I am off the hook, whether she "forgives me" or not. It's very powerful voodoo. 

My experience has shown that this is all that forgiveness takes in a situation like this. The work is much more difficult in even more painful situations, such as sexual abuse, violence, backstabbing betrayal. In these cases where we are actually not at fault in any way, the process is more mysterious and also quite powerful. But we don't have the gift of making direct amends to the people who caused us nothing but harm where we were truly innocent. 

However, in an intimate relationship spanning years, of course it is delusional for one person to judge himself to be white as driven snow and hold the other person in 100% contempt. It is understandable, of course, in many situations. 

Just yesterday I was remembering the days of February last year during which A had completely cut me off and was utterly refusing to speak to me and had become a horrifying kind of automaton, cold and steely and absolutely distant. I am not done recovering from the trauma of that experience or the ways in which I felt humiliated and eviscerated by it. One early dark morning just after she had returned from her visit to her paramour, she bustled her usual bustle getting ready for work, as I sat on the bed and sobbed uncontrollably, soaking tissue after tissue with snot. And the entire time, she completely and totally ignored me. She didn't even say "I'm sorry you're in pain" or "hey, look, even if things don't work out with us, it's okay, it's okay." Nothing. Steely and cold, officious, efficient, as if I wasn't even there, let alone hacking sobs in the dark on the edge of the bed we had shared for five years. In the face of a humiliating and excruciating experience like that, it's difficult to become willing to make amends for my own wrongs. 

But the simple fact of recovery is: it has to be done. I have no choice. 

I am motivated anyway by the repeated experience of these traumas from the relationship with A coming up in current relationships. And excavating old, old, old wounds way down deep in the basement of my psyche. I want all of it gone. I don't want to re-enact the same old harms anymore. I want to be free. 

So I head back to my sponsor this week to hash all of this out. How can I make direct amends to A while protecting myself as much as possible? 

I know what the exact nature of my wrongs were as far as I have been able to determine through intensive inventory work.

I took her for granted. I lied to her. I ignored her. I resisted showing physical affection to her for about a year. I was depressed and didn't take responsibility for that and seek help. I acted on a deep sense of entitlement in exchange for providing hours of childcare and housework. I was selfish, self-centered, dishonest and afraid. 

There may well be other specific ways I wronged her that she will want to discuss. 

But I wonder if perhaps the best way to make amends in this situation is via some kind of mediated communication. The thought of sitting across a table from her and doing the amends in person is nauseating to me. I'm not afraid of it in any way— I have done far more difficult in person amends than this. I just do not want to see her. 

We'll find out what my sponsor thinks. I don't even know if A will be willing to hear an amends. She may well reject my offer to have an amends conversation. I have had this happen before and have had to find other ways to sweep off my side of the street. Anyway, in addition to a direct amends to her, I have already made living amends in regard to relationship patterns of mine, including getting help for depression, starting recovery in CoDA, working on cherishing anyone to whom I'm attached and cultivating love and not taking them for granted, and realizing more fully that showing up in relationship is not an exchange in which one builds entitlement. Huge lessons in regard to all of my relationships and significant behavioral change. 

Let me tell you, recovery is a fucking trip. 

High Tolerance

I am somehow equipped to bear a lot of existential despair, uncertainty, discomfort, emotional pain and flat out misery. It's funny that one of the ways people look at alcoholics is that they are weak, that they drink out of a failure to be able to sustain pain. In fact, my experience was that alcoholism inflicted so much chronic, intense and excruciating pain on a daily basis for decades that it is a wonder I didn't aerate my skull with a bullet years ago. 

So I wonder where this fundamental capacity I seem to have for sustained agony comes from. It seems intimately connected to some weird thread of self-preservation that is at the very base of who I am. No matter how hard I used to try to blot out the awareness of my intolerable condition, I have always redlined suicide as a live option, no pun intended. I think about it, I've even researched it, but actually doing it has never seemed possible to me. I used to think of that as being chickenshit, but now I think it's just a line that's always been there for unknown reasons. Of course, in the utter despair that was the bottom I hit in alcoholism back in March of 2004, I was slyly interested in getting as fucking wasted as I possibly could and "accidentally" not waking up, and there were at least 3 times that I can identify as almost being successful, thanks in particular to a combination of high proof booze, opioids and benzodiazepams.  

But you would think that strong instincts for self preservation would couple up with self preserving behavior and with self love as well as a sense of how to live with more ease and simple happiness. But no. I am prone to sustained melancholy, pain, loneliness and anxiety that doesn't seek any anodyne at all. That's the high tolerance part. 

One thing that has been helping, in addition to the buproprion and counseling, has been that weird cognitive behavioral therapy app I have on my phone, Pacifica. In particular, identifying my mood, listing several specific feeling words and then doing, for example, a reframing exercise. I noticed last night, again, that my self talk is really hateful. I talk to myself in ways I would never tolerate someone talking to someone I love, or someone else talking to me, for that matter. So maybe there's hope for some easing of the excoriating inner landscape I often experience simply by being kinder and more compassionate to myself. It feels fake right now, but maybe behavioral therapy is all about the practice and a sort of outside in, fake it til you make it regimen. I do know that after I let fly with the self-wounding hate talk and then reframed the language, I felt better. 

There have also been times where I have experienced a light, equanimous well being that was not intense nor was it ephemeral, and that I guess the Greeks would have called eudaimonia. These times have only been available in my adult life within recovery and sobriety. They do kind of echo some of the feeling tone of my boyhood. Just rambling around, basically liking myself and not doing much of anything except enjoying the presence of being. It would be okay by me if I could wear life loosely. If I could wear my attachments like a loose garment. And if I could just enjoy consciousness and make friends with myself and my mind. It would be absolutely unfamiliar as a sustained way of life, but I would take it. Maybe it could be like a spiritual and mental retirement. I can't retire financially any time soon, but maybe I could just let go of everything, absolutely, and find a way to spend the rest of my days (however many those are) in peace, ease, simple enjoyment and freedom. 

It seems like this decision would put me into truly unknown territory. To live with the assurance that all shall be well, Julian of Norwich wise, or at least, that even if all shall not be well, what the fuck can I do about it anyway? I just have so rarely truly occupied that space that it is quite unfamiliar to me. 

Life is much more often like. 

another panel from Agony, by Mark Beyer

How to Keep Doing Things You Don't Feel Like You Can Keep Doing

I legit have no fucking idea. But in many situations in my life, one way or the other, I have in fact kept doing things I didn't feel I could keep doing. So many different dynamics along these lines. My experience has been at many different levels with this. 

In general, staying alive through periods where I didn't want to. So that's the big one. You know, the big existential one. For me it's usually just, "well, here I am. I'm not going anywhere. I can't stand this, but I'm NOT going to x myself out, so here I am." I had a Facebook friend of mine describe suicide as something, for him, that "lives in the future." That is: it's out there. It could be, some day. But it lives in the future. It's a weird thing to live with though, because, to varying degrees, the thought of it recurs. There aren't very many other areas of life where the *decision* has been made: I'm not going to do that. But the *thought* of doing it returns again and again. This was briefly the case when I got sober, regarding drinking or drugging. But what AA calls "the mental obsession" was miraculously removed from me fairly early in sobriety, and I hardly ever think about drinking now. But even in my best moments, even after the work that's gone down the past year around depression, I still "think about" suicide on a fairly regular basis. It's not like I can manage it or control it. The thought just busts in. Sometimes it is aggressive, like, "I fucking hate myself and I fucking hate this and fuck you, I'm out." Most times it is embedded in furling melancholy and is just a cri de coeur, only meek and mild, like a thick black exudation of the soul. Sludgy and strange. Time to die. 

Panels from the book Agony, by Mark Beyer, who was a friend of mine when I was a kid in Allentown

Sometimes my sense of life is that I am already dead, anyway. That is, in that dialectical sense, my life contains and is constituted by my death, the germinating seed of which grows in ramifications more and more the older I get. The odd despair that comes, for example, from having a memory of an event that was 30 years ago, when I was 26, and feeling that the intervening time is vapor. Just a shade a blink a ghost of time. No time at all. A grey stretch in a flash. And then snapping to the fact that, if I am lucky (?) enough to live another 30 years, such will be my experience of what is happening now, but I will be fucking 86 years old. 86. 86 years old. And then I figure fuck this. What kind of deal is this? 

I know one is supposed to age gracefully, and I had always thought that phrase was more about physical appearance and capacity. Now I see it is in fact the developing resilience and acceptance of this excruciatingly painful state of affairs. This passage of time between blinks, in a blink. This horrifying sense that each moment gets precipitously shorter in a calculus of demise. 

Anyway, there's nothing that can be done about it. So ultimately it is a lesson in unmanageability. In this way, it is exactly like, well, everything. My life is unmanageable by me. 

Again, going back to the first step in CoDA: 

We admitted we were powerless over others— that our lives had become unmanageable. I don't think I can "handle" some behavior or other on the part of someone else, sometimes a close intimate, sometimes a total stranger. It's not so much the behavior that ends up infuriating me, wounding me, cutting me to ribbons, causing me grief. It's the inevitable confrontation with powerlessness that I most resent and that is the most painful. You can wish for your love to contact you, to be affectionate, to reassure you, to be available, all you fucking want. You can even explicitly ask for it. But fuck if you can make it happen. You can't make it happen. You can try withdrawing in order to be pursued. You can rage. You can beg. You can seduce. You can do whatever the fuck you want. But if you are going to stay in close relationship with someone who is not doing what you want, you are just going to suffer. You're fucked. 

I don't feel like I can keep doing it. But I am doing it. I sometimes lose my shit and try to dig a new channel for the stream and force another person to flow that way. It takes more than the entire Army Corps of Engineers to pull that shit off. I can "work on letting go," which is fucking hilarious, if you think about it. "Hey, will you fucking work on relaxing?" Nice meditation. 

Top all of this off with my tendency to get intimately involved with people who are not available and it's quite a recipe. Jung repeatedly talks about how the unconscious self creates situations where we have to confront our shadow, our greatest fears, our most primal wounds. I assume my tendency to get involved with unavailable people or to be in situations where the whole fucking situation is fucking fucked and is basically characterized by the word UNAVAILABLE has got to be deeply entwined with the deepest wounds and soul-problems I carry. Each time of course my unconscious probably is like "hooray! finally I will be heard and healed!" and then each time in the past I have gotten only so far. My kind therapist and my relatively kind sponsor would say, well, you have gotten as far as you were able to get at the time. Yeah yeah yeah. Failure is fucking failure, but thanks for being nice. 

Anyway, thanks for reading this far in this little ray of sunblight, as a friend of mine would say. Tell me you don't identify though. Or, actually, if you don't, fuck that. I don't want to hear it. You are not the person for me if this isn't some form of the self-same trip you have been on or are on. No anodyne either, no matter how hard you try. It is what it is. The only way out is through, say the goddamned sages, and goddamn it if they aren't correct. 

Nearly a Year

Ye Olde Blogge turns one year on March 6th. 202 posts (well, 203 if you count this one, which, why not?)

On Facebook a year ago today I wrote this:

"It's oceanic, transcendent bliss being the number one for a love and romance addict. There's nothing like being someone else's fix, the embodiment of that total rush and the alpha and omega of their existence. But when the high wears off be ready to be set aside, as soon as a new fix comes along. Because it was never about you at all- it was about the fix itself the whole time. And there you were with your own ego so flattered by being the center of someone else's obsession. Well, when you're irrelevant because you don't provide the required rush anymore and someone "new" does, good luck with that."

I was referring to A's sudden falling in love with her paramour and ghosting me, but it's kind of hilarious, because, as revealed in extensive inventory and step work since, it fits me like a glove in many of my past situations. 

It's been weird going back through the Facebook posts from the breakup around this time last year. I felt self-righteous, victimized, pissed off, sad, and hounded by obsessive thoughts of A with her new paramour. Of course, on March 3 of last year, I was only a couple days out of the situation, and truly headed for one of the worst stretches of my life, so I guess I can forgive a little bit of victim mentality. My sense of having been deeply wronged continued for several weeks, if I remember correctly— probably until around the beginning of June, on and off, which, well, is 12 weeks innit. 

I think making friends with Pluto has involved getting rid of the victim mentality and getting real about who I was, what I did, who I am now and how I have created everything myself, or at least, how I have choices in how to respond. Pluto seems a lot friendlier when he doesn't have to play bad cop. If I'm accepting of the ride through hell, then everything goes a lot more smoothly. 

I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "becoming friends with Pluto," but it mostly seems to center on letting go of everything, remembering that one can only travel very lightly through Hades, cultivating a devoted and meditative attitude, sitting with the initial discomforts of solitude in order to enter into nourishing solitude, not being surprised when waves of dark upon dark upon dark wash through my life. As well as venturing into the unconscious and having a dream life again, which has definitely been the case, after a long stretch of not remembering my dreams. 

Another aspect of it though is taking responsibility for my reality. I have been completely released from that gutting feeling of being a victim, of having been wronged, of having been thrown under the bus. I've regained a sense of being the locus of what is happening in my life, not a passive victim with the malevolent locus far outside. 

One thing is certain: it's incredibly wild how much has transpired in only one year. I feel like I have been challenged in every way, every day, for the whole year, in areas that are close to or at my very core identity and purpose. That is how intense this year looks in review. 

But it seems like it is finally unstuck in many ways, and there's a chance that the winding way goes toward or proceeds from a center.