Make my day part 2

Today was another magnetic day, where everyone I touched seemed drawn to me. I know LS calls it mania but no matter what you call it, it is real.

I went to my friend SK's church in hopes of bumping into him and talking with him about booking a room there for a meeting we were supposed to have on Tuesday. When it became clear that the room would not be available he suggested I try another church, which I did and where I met Pastor R., a friendly and enthusiastic man who greeted me warmly and kindly accommodated us.

Since I was in the neighbourhood I decided to pay a visit to my friend C. and his wife U.

And since I knew it was football conference finals day, I decided it was a good time to reconnect with my friends S. and P.

On my way to meet J and D for dinner, I had a series of friendly encounters on the subway, starting with a man in front of the station when I arrived. And at the bottom of the stairs, I bumped into an old friend K. from trivia club who was coming off the train who greeted me with her customary warmth and followed with some encouraging comments about my appearance and countenance. The subway love in carried onto the train where I befriended a Brazilian boy and his French companioness, who was delighted to hear my soft francotones. And to top it all, after the two of them departed the train upon noticing they had gone the wrong way, this south asian eavesdropper came up to speak with me and tell me that I spoke excellent French.

Making my day

When it rains, it pours, and lately it has been cats and dogs.
It has been another day of making successful connections, this is only a partial list.

J. the regional organizer of my political party at the presidents' meeting this morning.
M the riding prez of my new riding
S the riding prez of my old riding
a dozen other people at the president's meeting
My friend and coach and newly-minted political volunteer LD!
Butcher boy and blini couple at the food market.
Starbucks girls - blonde & redhead.
Liquor store woman.
Excusable Habs fan.
Lucky day parking woman.
CB2 girl.
Sarah with an H.
Pottery road Cab driver.
Amy & Cam.
LS - "are you sleeping?" who is the first person to suggest I am manic.
Sh and P.
Teenagers on the porch, O. Gardens.
it is important to recognize that when everyone around you is an asshole, it could also be that you are having trouble noticing your own assholity.

Controlled Flight into Terrain

In my struggle to overcome my dysfunctional mood one of the most interesting things that I have discovered is in fact I, and no one else, am essentially in complete control of it. In fact, it turns out my problems are all in my mind!

I am particularly well-read about aircraft disasters. I find it to be a fascinating subject - it is such an educated science, and each new disaster engenders an often obscenely elaborate search for cause, followed by directives and modified procedures, and a continual and gradual reduction of the fatality rate to the point where air travel is orders of magnitude safer than most or all other methods of transportation including not only automobile and rail but also walking, riding an escalator, etc.

But despite the tremendous and relentless progress in aviation safety, there are still and always will be disasters and casualties. And despite all the advances in technology and training and engineering, the most common cause of disaster continues to be one which they refer to as CFIT, i.e. controlled flight into terrain. The pilots lucidly and deliberately steered the ship into the rocks.

I feel like once I really understand that I am flying this thing called my life, that I will realise that I do not need to keep clipping the trees and slamming it into the mountians, that I will finally be able to rise above and soar above the clouds.

Phoebe

Phoebe is a nurse who is going to an interview at the hospital where I find myself working this afternoon. I was intrigued by the title of a book she had with her as she sat down across from me and it led to a conversation I struck up a conversation with her.

It matters

It all matters.
I know we thought it didn't, but it does.

Things to cry about

Sometimes i give my head a shake and say to myself, what do you have to be depressed about?
I want to start my life over again and live a different one. I feel like I am not the person I have lived as, and I cannot accept the way I have lived, the choices I have made and where it has led me. I feel like I have no one with whom I share similar interests and outlook. I feel excluded from the groups to which I want to belong and cannot figure out how I get in. I cannot accept that I spent so many years stubbornly rejecting the world when in fact I really want to embrace it. I find myself painted into a corner, a result of not simply my own negligence but my own deliberate action, if I can even be said to have been capable of such a thing as deliberation. I feel like I have not given enough or even any thought to most of the choices I have made in my life, that I never learned to consider decisions in light of a greater goal or purpose. the result has been that I have drifted reactively and no pro-actively, responding to stimuli (pain, mostly) and coping but never really planning and building something that I really wanted. I feel like I have therefore set the bar incredibly low in that my only real goal, other than maybe trying to be was to get through to the next day

I feel overwhelmed by decisions about my life, both day to day and long term. When I met S. I looked forward to finally living a life as a partnership, sharing a life and a family and a home, and sharing decisions. Having someone to assure and reassure me and help me. After living alone and independently for so long, I want guidance, I have lost faith in my instincts, I no longer trust myself to do what is right for me and I want to have someone else take an interest in me and help me.

I miss my girlfriend. I want her back even though she was immature, dysfunctional, and treated me badly. I have trouble recognizing her shortcomings and find myself dwelling on the companionship she gave to me, even though it was so vacant. I recognise that I was in a tremendous amount of pain when I was with her and found her behaviour to be irredeemably selfish, but I am nonetheless suffocating without her.

Finding love in the muck

Once again I am having a very hard time going forward today. I am so scared that I am going to be alone for the rest of my life, and that I sabotaged the best thing that ever happened to me when I threw away my relationship with S., my house, the cottage, the boat, my dad, everything. I threw the baby out with the bathwater, except I actually kept the bathwater and now I am cold, shivering, wet, dirty, and alone. and the lights are off. in fact the power is off in the whole house. in fact there is no house, the bathtub is outside in the cold winter air.

I burst into tears at the dentist this morning when she was giving me the flossing lecture and I am surprised she did not call a mental hospital and have me admitted. I wish she had actually.

It is not that I have some new perspective on S.'s selfish and disrespectful behaviour towards me. But even with all that, she was the closest, kindest and lovingest connection I have ever had in my life, and I long for it back, because in 40 years nothing else ever came close to that. Why did I not realise how painful this solitude would be when I chose to break her heart and mine like I did? I can't stand it. I just sit here feeling so sad and alone and helpless and hopeless and I picture her wherever she is and I am convinced that I am just being stubborn and foolish FOR NO REASON other than wanting to be proven right or something, like I need everyone to agree she was mean to me and it was not fair etc. Fuck fair! I want love, I want it so badly. It is no accident that I respond so well to someone like LD who is so warm and generous and loving and affectionate and feminine - I have a huge void there to fill, and it feels so good when it comes but it is like shovelling sand into an ocean, it disappears as fast as you can pour it in.

I started working on some of the stuff LD asked me to work on, but I get so easily stuck in these stupid loops like the one here. I think I need a month in a rehab or something, somewhere where I can just stop beating myself about everything and just let it happen or something. I should have done that over the holidays instead of lying in my bed crying, but I could not force myself to.

One of the things I want to work on if I can ever stop crying long enough is the list of things that I am crying about. I do not agree with LD that it will turn out to be shorter than I think -- but there is only one way to prove her wrong! And worse case she is right, which is even better, less to cry about. A lot of the techniques I have read about breaking out of negative thought patterns tell you to write them down as a first step toward identifying them for what they are, i.e. thoughts and not reality. I think it might also help to have an inventory of my triggers for when I go see new therapists as I sometimes think that I have trouble explaining the depth of my problem due to the capriciousness of my moods.

I need a hug - I am really looking forward to seeing LD and getting one on Thursday. I would like to have something written to show her but tomorrow is a crazy busy day where I actually have a very important meeting for work so on verra. The writing feels good though, when I can get to that headspace. Unlike almost everything else right now it feels like something I look forward to doing and more importantly to accomplishing, and for her encouragement and enthusiasm I am extremely grateful.

Oh LD, you have no idea how much I look forward to the day, if it ever comes, when I can demonstrate for you and those others who really love me, just how plentiful and magestic the love I have in me for you and for the rest is, and how I will revel in demonstrating it. I know it is all in there, I just hope I can find it among all the muck.

Eighth Grade

When I was in grade eight, I developed this sort of crush on a girl in my class, KL. She was bright and bespectacled and a fairly typical member of the more or less in-crowd of girls in my class: academically gifted and successful, attuned to the vagaries of what was fashionable for teenagers, e.g. manners of dress as well as the latest popular music, etc. My crush was perhaps better described as an obsession, which I doggedly pursued with a disturbing determination and for a disturbingly long time - throughout the winter and spring of grade eight and through the summer and autumn and winter of grade nine.

Alea iacta est

My experience this afternoon at the hands of K. was so disheartening that I cannot realistically continue to behave as if recovery were possible.

Haunted

Predictably, I did not "go for it" last night and instead went home and had a
solitary supper in my bed in front of the TV. LD reminds me that I have much to offer, I just don't know what it is going to take for me to accept it and start to enjoy living my life. I just feel so completely lost, and hollow.

I had a very difficult time falling asleep last night, was awake until after 4.
I kept trying to read myself to sleep and closing my eyes but then once they
were closed I would start thinking all my destructive thoughts and would wake up
so much that I had to read again to get my thoughts off of everything. This is
actually not that uncommon recently.

In the end I was obviously not sufficiently distracted and I awoke this morning
from a long elaborate dream about S. and V. I cannot escape these thoughts of
her, she haunts me every day and every night.

What to do in the event the aircraft arrives safely at its destination

Another cherished assignment, courtesy of LD! Make a list of at least ten things you could do, instead of going home, turning all the lights off, getting into your bathrobe, lying in bed and lulling yourself to sleep watching plane crash videos.

- Go to A's and have dinner & drinks with him, M and J. and whoever else turns up.
- Go to S's birthday party at the tavern and catch up with him, J., A., L., etc.
- Send SMS to K. (with whom I have plans tomorrow afternoon) and see if she is spontaneously free.
- Check the listings and go to a movie.
- Go for a walk.
- Call my father and go visit him.
- Call my mother and go visit her.
- Sit in the coffee shop until 11 pm.
- Work on my many outstanding tasks for work.
- Go for a motorcycle ride.
- Sort out my paperwork for year end bookkeeping, taxes, etc.
- Call up old friends and find someone who is free to meet for a beer.
- Clean my apartment in case I decide to invite K. over tomorrow after our hike.
- Go home, put on 80s music, drink a bottle of scotch, call up ex-girlfriend (note: this option should probably be considered hors concours due to its similarity to the precluded scenario contained in the instructions)
- Go to a neighbourhood pub and have a beer and chicken wings and strike up conversation with other lonely hearts at bar.

New Narrative

This was actually a homework assignment given to me by my life coach, LD, before the holiday season, after I shared with her my dread about the inevitable catching up with friends, family, colleagues and the like which accompanies the festive season.
I was horrified at the thought of having to account for my situation and how it is has changed in the past year. I feel like I have regressed so much in that time and my narrative was an accurate illustration of that sentiment: I am alone, cut off from my girlfriend, her son, her cat. I sold my house and moved somewhere I despise, and lost my cat. I am almost never seeing any friends, feeling either too depressed and ashamed to see people, or else deciding that they are not really good friends and are in fact toxic to my well-being. I am cut off from my father and the rest of my family, having actively chosen an agressively confrontational stance with him in the wake of my relationship collapse. I am not going out, not working, not enjoying anything, not going anywhere, not planning anything interesting, etc.

She instructed me to compose a new narrative to replace the shameful one I was hung up on, in order that I would be comfortable enough to attend and to converse with people and not be so afraid of them asking me how things were going for me.

In fact however I did not manage to get my homework done in time, and not only did I not hand it in, I also ducked out on attending all of the events and instead spent the holidays alone in my uncomfortable apartment, isolated, lost and despondent, lying in bed, eating frozen pizza and drinking can after can of diet cranberry soda. I missed the annual Xmas party at H's, which I have not missed in over 20 years and which is only a couple of blocks from my house. I skipped Xmas eve dinner at J's, which she was extremely upset about. I skipped Xmas day at LD's, despite her earnest attempts to convince me of the safety of attending. I carried that through to the next day when I again ignored her invitations to join her and her husband and friend at her place, and finished up by no-showing at my own family Xmas dinner at my mother's house.

The exercise was supposed to produce a set of positive and encouraging talking points for me to use in place of these negative ones:
- I am struggling
- This year has been an incredible challenge
- I have encountered and foundered upon significant obstacles
- I have been very depressed and unstable
- I am isolated from my friends and family and devoid of a support system.

Here is what I came up with:
- I am heading in a new direction with my life.
- I have a few projects on the go.
- I am refocussing on what is important
- I am getting in touch with my authentic self
- I am making a fresh start with a new beginning
- I have made some positive changes in my life and am continuing to make more
- I am optimistic about the future
- This is an exciting time for me.
- The possibilities are numerous if not endless
- I am getting to know myself in a profound way.

What a load of horseshit it reads like when I look at it now.