Where have I been?

My intent for this blog was, as you can see below, the one-a-day post, each labeled with the date, as a form of discipline. It worked at first, but over the last few days I've been thrown for a pretty strong emotional loop, and I haven't had anything left for the bloody computer, so to speak.

I don't want to go into full detail here--I still have some boundaries to the open disclosure efforts here--but suffice it to say I'm having a lot of preconceived, long-held notions about love and relationships and connections challenged, and challenged hard. Combine that with the work I've been doing to open myself, which only recently manifested itself in this blog, and it's been a very emotional time for me. It's made me feel weak as a baby a lot of the time, and yet there are glimmers of the hope and newness of said baby peeking through the clouds a little. It's what they call in my Clark Kent corporate world a "stretch experience". Just call me the rubberband man.

But, thankfully, in addition to that there's been a lot of good stuff going on throughout the week. I've finally cracked open the walls I'd built between me and getting in touch with two people who are very dear to me, Tris and Nicki, and also threw myself out at a random moment to an interesting new person who's seeking a musical interaction, Julia.

It will take me some time to really sort it out--and I'm actually hoping I just find a way to move on from it so effectively that I never really do need to go back and ponder it--but I have this confounding tendency to just go into deep space and lose touch with the people I love the most. Along with Tris & Nicki, there's Charles, Eric, Christie, and of course Ann Marie, who's been closer to me than anyone in recent times yet has still suffered from my affliction. I can pretty much make a list of the people I've most cherished in my life, and I've been more frequently in touch with people at work whose names or faces I don't even know than I have them. Even my sister, who I love as much as anyone in the world, hasn't heard from me in 6 months. And the same goes for doing the things I love to do the most in my life.

It would take too long for me to even wrap my words around the basic components of the problem, but the point here is that I've been choosing to work against it. Not completely or all at once, but with individual direct choices. I just emailed Nicki out of the blue, just wrote Tris and started opening up. Just drove over to Julia's and hopped up on the porch and started chatting.

This isn't rocket science. Most people do this stuff naturally. But I've got problems with it. I think that for some reason I'm really under-valuing myself, and thus removing myself from the field of play again and again and again. AM's tried working on this with me, trying to get me to see how my not giving myself enough credit hurts me and her both. I've resisted that lesson, but am finally waking up to it. And it's uncomfortable to wake up to, because it involves accepting how much time and life I've wasted in the process, and it involves the fear of losing some I love, including her, because of how long it's taken me to understand.

Tris just wisely said to me "you are a goldmine and you are the worst foreman of a mine in the history of the world." I feel like I'm in the midst of a really wonderful learning experience, growth experience, and I have a sense that there is a change energy that's been tapped into. But I'm also so afraid of losing someone I love in the process. I don't want that to be the price of a lesson learned. I've had enough of that in my life. I want to learn the lesson and keep the love.

But anyway, I've felt well-loved this week by what's chosen me. Tris greeted me with more love and understanding than I felt I deserved (which, my loved ones would shout in a chorus, is something I need to stop saying!), and wrote words of uncommon wisdom and insight, just when I most needed them. He also very cleverly proposed a pledge that would enforce ongoing contact (I accept, Tris!), so there will be more to tell of this.

And it was wonderful to see Nicki. She was a victim of the fallout from my divorce, when my self-image crashed and I fled from all the friends who loved me and for whom I no longer thought I was worthy. I've thought so hard about getting in touch with her for years, but have been too stuck in my mind-world. This week, I just did it. Just like that. She was responsible for one of my peak experiences, spending 9 days in the desert of Moab, Utah 10 years ago. It was a magical time and a magical place, still singular in my mind. At that time I was working at the university, a simple job in a simple life, but a good simple, not the suffocated one I've forced on myself in recent times. I was playing music with the local Irish band (having them all walk over to my place unannounced on my birthday, playing their instruments along the street and walkway leading up to my door, is still a magically surreal memory for me), seeing friends regularly, living in a 2-bedroom place in a neat old house, walking to work. Almost immediately after coming back from Moab, I met my future wife (incidentally, one of only three occasions of love at first sight I've ever had, all of them quite random--one in a 7th-grade science class, one on the sidewalk while playing Irish music, and one that followed a random knock at my door on a dark, rainy night). Those were good times.

But these pesky barriers to self-worth have combined in recent years with a sense that working and living are separate entities to create a painful and persistent sort of social/emotional agoraphobia, which has affected all my relations. Especially tragic is that it's plagued me while I've had such a wonderfully adventurous and free-spirited person like AM in my life. One of the main effects has been to make me feel that I need to be able to do something special, provide something special, for anyone into whose life I'm presumptuous to insinuate myself. In other words, it's not inherently good enough to just give them me. Whether it's just because I'm a man, or through some type of conditioning, I've devalued the purely emotional and focused on the practical providing as my show of worth to those I love, without even really intending to or wanting to, and it's just depressing to think about all the time I've wasted in the process.

Of course, I'm glad I'm seeing all this now. I'm glad to finally be understanding what's been going on, why things have been breaking down, why I seem to work harder yet become more unfulfilled with it over time. Thank goodness for that understanding. But it's also harrowing to see that emotional blood on my hands.

I want to keep this going. I'm going to need help to do it.