Onions

I'm cheating! I haven't posted for a long time. I'm taking a shortcut!

I've been visiting with my daughter, Kristi and my grandchildren, Vanessa and Joe who all came to see me from Phoenix Arizona. So of course I took a few days off. We were all living together when I wrote this story. I guess I was trying to be funny in a sarcastic sort of way. This photo is from Flikr's Creative Commons, taken by Bahman Farzad, entitled "onion-sha". For more information on Bahman Farzad click on the title "Onions"

12/27/05

Onions

Life is a bitch! Full of hurt feelings, the kind that make your eyes bright red and well up with big old alligator tears. Your throat feels like it’s locking up. Your chest hurts cause you heart is breaking in half and you feel like you can’t breathe. So while all this is going on, you’re acting like none of it is happening, to save face. It’s killing you but you manage. You wait until you’re alone, like in the shower and then you sob. But this is a hollow cry, a counterfeit cry, because it’s lost it’s wallop, its truth, it’s time in reality. Then you wonder why you react to hurt feelings like this. Haven’t you done the work? Haven’t you read numerous books? Watched PBS.

So, just when you think that you’ve solved some of the major problems of the past, an old crisis rears its ugly unrecognizable head. Most likely, a huge and brutal ordeal endured in childhood. Which has, unbeknownst to you, affected your entire life, but you thought you worked it out, you know, dealt with it. By dealt with it, I mean that you’ve taken time, like years. Given the problem a ton of energy, meaning your ongoing life is now unrecognizable so you could roll your sleeves up and really give this wickedness all you’ve got. To keep at it until you know you found a thick layer of deep-rooted pain and peeled it back to reveal feelings you have kept hidden for years (very painful) and then came to some healthy resolution. That would be in a perfect world.

But no! There are many, many layers to these spastic evils and it seems that the troubles are never really solved. They just recede into another level. Another deeper, thinner, more transparent level, that is further and further away from every day life, as a matter of fact, it is just out of your conscience reach. True, its not as painful as the really profound, well hidden ordeals, but never the less, its THERE, a little black mark on your soul, and no matter how tiny it gets, it’s still there. Forever! It’s the place that eternally shows the wounds of living. It’s a special little scar, which can perpetually be reopened, time and time again, by some kind of trigger in your life.

A trigger would be an unknown or unremembered set of events that somehow resemble a deep trauma earlier in life. The really tricky part is while your conscious mind keeps the tempo of your life intact and promotes your existence, thinking every thing is just sunny, your subconscious mind is in anguish re-living the same old upset again. And you don’t really know why you feel like shit, you just do. It’s like the movie “Groundhog Day”, where the guy lives the same day over and over again until he finally gets it right. But of course that is Hollywood so eventually there’s a happy ending. Real life on the other hand is ongoing and never ending until of course you die. So you get to re-live all those horrid disturbances from your early childhood. For your entire life. The other really fucked up part about all this is that you emotionally spiral downward into a terrible depression that you can not let anybody else know you’re experiencing. You can never let them know because they are compelled to fix you, but no matter what they try to do for you, they can never fix it. Besides that, being depressed is not the politically correct thing to do. We are supposed to be able to heal ourselves and deal with the issue at hand promptly and neatly. So you look at how you are dealing with things in your life because that’s the beginning of trying to heal yourself.

What do you see? Your life’s a mammoth muddle and every little thing that happens is bothering you but you definitely don’t have any idea why. You’re basically emotionally unavailable in your own life. It’s just kind of a sketchy vague feeling. Like a dark cloud hanging over you. You can’t see it you just recognize its there, casting a murky shadow on your life. You can’t seem to do or think anything right. That’s when you realize that you’re not dealing with it in a prompt and neat way. The more you think about it the more you realize that you’re a failure, and will forever more be a failure because of some childhood setback that you can’t ever seem to “heal”. So there goes the spiral. Down. Down. Down. And as sad as all that seems, the really sad thing is that people like me raise people like me. It’s a circle. It goes round and round.

Ok! That’s where I am right now. Hopefully, it will change soon. It always does.