Story Feller'

When you lose your innocence as a child, you spend your life trying to return to it the same way you try to return to a lost dream upon waking.   Like what you experience for real will never measure up to what you imagine was lost.  That's an exhausting equation for living.  I'm spent.

Whenever I get this way I like to be looked over.  I like a thorough poking and prodding.  As I cannot afford one,  I took an online test.

I went big picture this time with a comprehensive exam, a give it to me straight, Doc, approach. None of this breaking things down into parts bullshit.  I took the Complete Psychological Evaluation, because really, what's left?

It produced a Good News/Bad News result.  The Good News is there's a sensible, concrete explanation for my depression, and general oddities.  The Bad News is I'm more broken than I thought.  If I had an Indian name it would be "Shattered Man Been Beaten, And Abused, Who Not Smile Much Hardly".

My online diagnosis...PTSD, or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  TA-DA.   That sounds pretty much on point, with a high likelihood of exactly right.  I answered questions that addressed the complete spectrum of my life, from all the significant periods.  Childhood.  Adolescence.  Young Adulthood.  Less Young Adulthood.  Almost Adulthood.  Resembles Adulthood.  Arrested Development.  Present Day, and so on.   My responses were analyzed, and the Cyberchologist connected the dots for me.   

• Start with a traumatic childhood with dysfunctional attachments, emotional and physical abuse, and no boundaries, or discipline.
• Fast forward to a 'lost' period where no guidance, support, or direction was modeled, or discussed.
• Skip ahead to an 11-year marriage that was dependent upon an unspoken agreement that my needs were always a distant second, and the applied template reproduced the emotional abuse, and manipulation I was a servant to as a boy.  No blame, your Honor, that's my signature on the contract.
• Pause at the divorce where I self-destructed to get out, and recognized a flicker of something different in myself than the man I agreed to become. 
• Snap back to Life, and toward a repair that resulted in the rejection of my request to re-write familial roles, and redefine sibling relationships.  A rejection announced in unison with the turning away of every family member, in-law, out-law, and in-bred, and an orchestrated mass abandonment, and judgment that considered fact, and make-believe, but mostly make-believe.  Finally, with no Trust in the reserves, removal from my community.
• Stumble into the here and now, and the most recent sequence of events where I was summarily discarded, and publicly belittled by some really smart people who don't even know me, but needed me to act as a distraction, or scapegoat, to cover some relatively large mistakes they made when providing me with direction.

Of course, there are some real Freud's involved, it's just that the nature of this particular brain disfigurement doesn't have, or want, much to do with anyone real.  Real people did this to my brain.  They're the trigger, the culprit, and the threat.  At a certain point, the desire to go to them for assistance is supplanted by the incapacitating fear that they'll turn out the same as everyone else who promised to help, but did 'hurt' instead.

For those of you still convinced I'm a wimp, or a whiner, you should try it.  It's a ball.  You spend days locked away in darkness as the weight of it all builds, and then as many days mustering the initiative to get away from it.  When you finally do, and you swing the door open and step into the sun, you freeze.  You may be willing to give life another try, but your brain isn't interested in accompanying you.  After all, he's the one that collects the bruises.  "How many times do you need to be coaxed, and then crumbled?" he wants to know.  'Never again' is his answer, and he controls everything.

And if you still think will power, or determination, are the cure, and that the mind only has the power you give it, ask yourself where you were heading the next time that brain of yours takes you sleepwalking.  Ask yourself who betrays you when you tell your secrets in your sleep, and have to do damage control with your spouse for a week.  Ask yourself who gets a hard-on, and ejaculates on your clean sheets without so much as a brush from the palm of your hand, or dinner.

Stop being naive.

If that grey shit in your head can use your body without your permission while you're not even conscious, if it can get you to walk out to the den, or tell your wife where you hide your surplus cash between snores, if it can get your dick hard, and empty it while your eyes are closed, and no Playboy, it can figure out what it will no longer agree to even if you still do.

 What the smart Morons at CSUMB 

didn't see was the history they were 

piling on, or the sag their portion

 added to my Spirit, or its collapse.  Does it matter?  I'm a cautionary tale, either way.
Potato.
Poe-tah-tow.

It does make you wonder, however, if maybe we should do our best to treat others as if this day 

(the one we're in together, the one we're sharing) 

  is the one that can save them, or take them apart.

When I'm being dismantled, I tell my story to reconstruct, and reconnect.

Once Upon A..

I tell my stories to see my truth against the perceptions that exist of me.  

I tell my stories, so those who tell mine differently, will know I don't subscribe to their version.

I tell my stories to whoever will listen, or to no one, depending upon where I am.

Most of all, I tell my stories to my sons.

I tell them, so when they hear the others, they'll know the Man they see, 

is the Man I actually am,  I tell them to ensure they have the opportunity to remember me how they choose, on their own.

It's hard to tell my story without including my mother.   I remember talking to her as she was dying. She was laying in her bed, propped up against pillows so the fluid in her lungs wouldn't drown her. The afternoon sunlight was fading from the room, and without prompting  she said, " You'll be glad when I'm gone."   I thought she was nuts.   Glad?   You're my mom. I won't know what to do without you.

The finches were gathering outside her window, at the feeder.  She wondered out loud what they would do when she died, and how they would survive.

" You'll be glad when I'm gone."  she said, " because your life will finally be your own."   Okay, now she's fucking Plato.  Plato seduce little boys with his orations, just like my mom, and the way she told me I could do anything in the world. She never mentioned limitations,  or discipline,  or reality in this world she spoke of, or sustained, hard work.
Well, not with me, at least.

She started telling me her stories when I was a kid.  She said I'd be a famous writer, with the emphasis placed on famous.  I don't know what I wrote to make her say that, but even if I'd written volumes, I was still seven.

There was one story though, one where I personified cars in a narrative of a dramatic, inspiring, and heartbreaking race.  That story earned first prize in a school wide writing contest.  That story was stolen from a kid I overheard sharing the synopsis with a friend.  Vroom.

Dream Sherpa

It was her dream to write words that made her well known, not mine.  She wanted that for herself.   She never knew that, or admitted it, anyway.  When she died, she saddled me with the dream, which may be why I resisted writing for decades.   She left me her Macintosh computer with a sticky note on it that said, "For Patrick, so he can write The Great American Novel."

Great American novel?  

Great American novels are about tragedies.

They're tragic.   

They're about tragic flaws and tragic mistakes in tragic people.

Wait.....

I am a tragically flawed mistake.

I am, already, a Great American Novel.

I'm the saddest story I know.

And my mom is dead.

I know what she meant now, though, about being glad she's gone.  She meant I wouldn't have to face her when I switched back, and changed directions, midstream, to discover my own.  She meant I'd finally be able to talk about things I agreed not to talk about while she was breathing.   My mom was a smart lady, like Plato.  

• She knew if I chose to talk about them after her ashes were sprinkled into Lake Tahoe,  I'd have to carry the burden of them alone.  
• She knew I'd carry them, and finally figure out I didn't have to anymore, then write my best line, ever: 'Fuck this shit, man.'  Brilliant. 
• She knew two truths about our Family, and why we had them, or needed them, or choose them.  She knew our Family could either insulate its members from exposure to our defining secrets, or it could decipher them, and their confessions. 
• She knew the burden of denying them both could dismantle a family as swiftly as the decision to name them, and lay them down.  
• She predicted the disintegration of her 'family', in writing, as soon as she was no longer here to hold it.  She knew my siblings. 

Fucking Plato, I tell you.