This Is Not An Exit

“Fuck a bunch of this.”

It’s one in the afternoon and he rises from bed – not because he has to or wants to, but mostly because he’s tired of wrestling with the alarm clock. The five-more-minutes routine can only go on for so many hours before you’d rather slam your fingers in the drawer than roll over again.

Shit.

What has happened? The once-perky ball of foolish idealism has been reduced to a bad idea written on a crumpled napkin. Stale cereal for breakfast, wine for lunch and beer for dinner – the serial dater has met his match. Is he jaded? Damn right he’s jaded. Maybe it’s more than that, though.

He saw it coming, though. A wild and beautiful tulip resting on a bear trap. There was only one available outcome, but this fool thought he’d trade a limb for the opportunity. For once in his life there would be no immediate rebound. No lightning storm of grief followed by amnesia. No, this is less like a storm and more like slowly rising flood water. It has barely reached his waist and yet he flails and sputters – damp and miserable. It’s not so much the depth as the knowledge that soon the water will rise to his teeth and he has no concept of how to weather the flood.

At one time all he wanted was anything but a repeat. No shitty break up, no arguing, no bitterness. What a silly thing to ask for. Now – with respect and love – there is no clean break. No way to dismiss history. No chance to say “out of sight, out of mind”. Instead there is a slow, dull ache that persists and will persist. There are obligations and responsibilities. There is cognitive dissonance: love and respect on one side and the need to snuff out the persistent discomfort on the other. A line that even a tightrope walker cannot tow.

The sure-footed, hardheaded imbecile now flounders.

Shock.

It’s starting to hit me.

A Great Awakening?

There’s something growing inside of me this week.

I’m not sure what it is, but I feel, simultaneously, a great sense of urgency and a kind of peace. It’s unusual, to say the least. I’m, at once, hyperaware and calm, anxious and at ease. In limbo.

Still, though, I feel as though I’m standing on a precipice. There’s no retreat – one path forward, but I don’t yet have the ability (or maybe the will) to take the first step.

Growth is a funny thing. We don’t often recognize it until it has passed. Until we’re forced to gaze back on our lives and see our trajectory – a relief map of our existence to this point. Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe I’m fully experiencing this growth as it occurs.

Now, more than ever, I feel that I have some semblance of control over the trajectory of my life. Not complete. Just some ability to steer myself, ever so slightly.

My days have passed in somewhat of a pleasant haze…

Up, Up and Away!

Sometimes it takes a little shake-up to get you moving again. So when I panicked and hit the ER last week – that was the shake-up. I was shaken for a few days afterward, too. I didn’t think that I was – I insisted that I felt okay. I did feel okay. I hadn’t fully processed it, though.

Taking a few days off work, though, and finding myself in a few instances where I felt foreign to myself – stressed, moody, uneasy – gave cause for some reflection and recognition.

It’s less something that can be conveyed than something that is felt. I can’t tell you what it is I’ve figured out, just that I have figured it out. Regardless, it’s a nice feeling.

Today we went to the Coal River and swam. Well, it was hardly swimming. It was more like wading along very slippery, moss-covered rocks and trying not to bust our asses. After a while of looking like silly, scared animals – clinging to rocks or scuttling along on all fours – we finally just let go and floated down river. This is sort of what it felt like to figure out my situation… If that helps illustrate at all.

I spend a lot of time trying to keep my footing. A lot of time clinging to rocks to keep from being dragged along with the current, and each time a rock is dislodged and floats down river, I lose my balance and get frustrated. As long as I fight the current, I feel anxious and too-conscious of how vulnerable I am. You let go, though, and just float along and suddenly the water feels nice, the current is friendly, and you don’t have nearly as many scrapes and bruises as you would have had you continued to scramble for solid ground in a rushing river.

I’m ready.

The End of an Error

So, I’ve made attempts at quitting smoking in the past. The most successful run was in Mexico for about fifty days.

The other day my girlfriend and I decided to quit smoking. She did so quite immediately and successfully, it seems, but I fell into the same old pattern.

I justified “having a few” by comparing it to the pack and a half I normally smoke, and called that “progress”. When I woke up today, though, I had a broad epiphany about wanting versus doing. I had wanted to quit smoking, but never just fucking did it. So today I just did it.

I threw out my roller, papers and 3/4′s of a big ol’ tin of Zig Zag. I had one Pall Mall left, smoked it on the front porch and that was that.

We’ll see where I end up, but I feel a lot more confident. I think I can see this through.

Finding Center

Yesterday was pretty shitty in a number of ways and it brought out the shitty in me, which was simultaneously no bueno but probably also a good reminder that checking oneself is always solid, lest one wrecks themselves.

Little reactions and bullshit nonsense rise up in everybody, and while I’ve been pretty good – I think – about maneuvering around that and really living up to who I want to be, I fall off the horse from time-to-time. Asi es. C’est la. You get the point.

Heading over to Danny’s party helped a lot, though, and I got to really think about it and reflect on the day and myself and by the time I woke up this morning I really feel like I had progressed – even just a bit. Bad days are good for that. Mistakes and bullshit are good for that, too. You can’t know light without the dark, and all that jazz – am I right?

It’s a process. One foot in front of the other. The best you can do is just go day-by-day and leave the worries by the wayside. Something I’m not particularly good at, but Lord knows I can do it if I try.

Practicing Perfect

A big part of my philosophy is self-improvement. Maybe it stems from my early interest in buddhism or from reading books with an underlying current of anarchism during high school. I guess the obvious ones to point out would be “Siddhartha”, “A Clockwork Orange” or “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. Hell, one could probably even throw in my politics – a 21st century blend of socialism and anarchism with a pretty substantial commitment to prefigurative politics/dual power. Y’know: building the world of tomorrow in the shell of yesterday.

That requires a hefty degree of criticism/self-criticism and the ability to change and adapt on a daily basis to shed learned behaviors and acknowledge privilege.

It’s hard, though, to draw a line between what you want to be and what you think people want you to be. Difficult, sometimes, when you’re dissecting yourself to know whether you’re using your own scalpel or borrowing everyone else’s hatchet. Moreover, the more you change yourself the more sensitive you are to others who are doing no such thing. If you’re not careful, it makes you intolerant or impatient or lack understanding.

People are just people, though. Perfection isn’t a destination, but an action; it’s a process. We’ve got to build one another, grow together and acknowledge that the multitude of different experiences and opportunities we’ve each had have brought us to different places at different times.

Too often do we expect everyone to be on the same page. Our culture is so homogenized that we have a habit of drawing all our conclusions and expectations with the same pen we’ve used to draw our own self-portraits. There’s no beauty in that. No challenge, either. It’s fiction, really, and leads us down a path of constant, bitter disappointment.

It’s better, I think, to find meaning in the process and find ourselves in the development of ourselves and others than to unwrap the people in our lives like pre-packaged gifts. Shaking and listening to these fragile packages and taking bets on what’s inside…

Panic Bomb

About two months ago I had my very first panic attack. Now, I’ve definitely freaked out before. I’ve gotten incredibly emotional, erratic, temporarily insane… It’s not the same thing, though. See, when you’re just freaking out there’s a sense of agency. You may feel overwhelmed, but ultimately you’re driving that sensation. You’re voluntarily wrapped up in it – even if you’re responding to events that are outside your control. Panic attacks, though, are pretty firmly involuntary.

When the projection of the life I thought I wanted crumbled on April 1st – literally, all of it came crashing down in an instant – I sort of lost it. I took a few weeks to crash with my folks, see old friends and generally get my shit together. It worked.

I came back home and found myself refreshed and ready. The last two months have been incredible, really. There has been some anxiety here or there, but no big episodes and for the most part I’ve been happy, if not ecstatic. Things, generally, are really great. So when I had another panic attack this morning it’s safe to say I was not only confused but terrified.

There was no trigger. No thought. No event. Just difficulty breathing and a racing heart. “Okay, this has happened before. No big deal. Let’s breathe and wait it out.” No dice. “Okay, let’s go home and get your medicine and lay down for a bit.” Getting worse. “Okay… Shit.” Face goes numb. “Hospital time.”

It’s hard to describe how incredibly vulnerable you feel in these situations. It’s worse when you’re fully cognizant of what is happening to you, but you just can’t stop it. It’s the worst, though, when you can’t even conjure up a reason for it. Scary to think that when everything is so great, your body can still behave like the sky is falling.

I don’t want to focus on that, though. It’ll just increase the anxiety.

Life is good. I’m not unemployed and I’m generally healthy. Life is great. I have awesome friends and absolutely love West Virginia. Life is amazing. I have a wonderful family and I find more reasons, every day, to appreciate my girlfriend.

I don’t really know much about these kinds of things – mental health and all that jazz – and the more I think about it (especially in regard to myself) the less sense it all makes…

You Don’t Have to be Down to Get Up

It’s good, sometimes, to recount the lies we once believed. Healthy, even.

There’s nothing romantic about despair. We flip channels and see unrequited lovers weep in their beds or sulk while taking a stroll through cold, empty streets and we’re told that this is true romance. This is dedication. This is commitment.

You know what’s romantic? Hope is romantic. Courage. Strong morale. It’s not nearly as easy as sad rainy walks or bloodshot eyes, but it’s a hell of a lot more effective.

How much time did I waste tossing and turning? How much money did I pour into barrels of booze that helped hold me under when what I really needed was to surface and breathe?

Weightlessness – now that’s romantic. Unflinching resolve in the face of adversity. Youthful optimism tempered by strength of experience…

Perhaps.

Focus.

You’ve got to refresh and forget the frenetic fancies that prove folly when feeling the fantastic formation of familiarity with that ferociously fabulous female.

Silence the psychological slips and sweet slivers of senseless surrender to all the sundry sensations of self-serving salvation.

Fabricated fears and phobias form faux friction in the frontal lobe providing only feeble frontiersmen on love’s rough landscape feeding into fumbled chances at affection’s fair glances and taxes the mind, subsidizing your soul with rubber from the soles of your worn out shoes.

Pacing.

Is it sad or silly to spend subsequent minutes that expand like seasons suffering from squeamish sessions of self-doubt and segments of speculation?

And like a siren she sings, calling out the cautious boy that coyly toys with the notion that this new nymph might nullify the nagging need for the necessity that is company.

Like an arrow she takes aim – alleviating the ailments of this adolescent who actuates his adoration for the adept angel that accosts his attention at no cost.