Blue Monday

My sister K. asked me this morning how I was, where I was on the downer scale, from 1 to 10. I told her three, but subsequently I would estimate it more like a two.

Feelings are not reality. That has been my mantra since last week, courtesy of LD, who wrote that, and more, in a very helpful email to me in which she also invited me, when I am ready, to engage with her in a "visioning" exercise. Right now it is so hard to see the light. And yet even in these bleak days I have had occasional good ones, where my mood was completely the opposite. And it is just as hard when I am up like that to remember what it feels like to be down like this, as it is now to even imagine a future where I am happy.

Gratitude Lists

LD suggested that I start doing a daily gratitude list in order to remind myself of the things I should be thankful for and which ought to make me feel a bit more blessed and a little less cursed. This is the initial list I sent her yesterday.

• I am grateful for my God-given blessing of living in relative comfort in a technologically advanced society.
• I am grateful for my sister and her unconditional support for me whenever I need it.
• I am grateful for my many friends who selflessly and generously give me their time, their ears, and their shoulders.
• I am grateful for my innate talents of intelligence and introspection.
• I am grateful for my work, for the rewards and challenges it continually offers me.
• I am grateful for all the opportunities I have been given which have enabled me to achieve the successes I have.

Gradually expanding your comfort zone

The secret to building confidence is to repeatedly take action that gradually expands your comfort zone. Over time, your nerves settle and feelings of self-confidence develop.
That is what it says here!

Awakening

I find it hard to settle on one particular metaphor to describe the process of awakening I have undergone since January, and continue to undergo as I transition (I think!) to a purposeful life. Even "awakening" is of course a metaphor -- an accurate but vague one, with many more colourful cousins. In the early days and weeks, when the fog had first lifted, I likened the feeling to rapture, and somewhat cheekily and rather crudely explained that it felt like I had unknowingly been walking around most of my life with my head up my ass. Such a posture would of course cultivate a sort of ignorance which would be invisible to the subject, until such time as he, as did I, manages to remove his head from the comforts of its prison and lifts it up to survey the view above the grass and take in the new, wider context. In some ways it is not so much a graduation from a pointless to a purposeful life, as it is an expansion of horizons, and of capacity, allowing a starved purpose finally to grow. In other words, ignorant life was not purposeless, it was simply governed by a purpose whose scope was in fact well-suited to the restricted perspective.

And peeking above the grass is really just the first glimpse of the bigger world out there. Even from way down here I can see that there are a whole series of higher perches with even broader perspectives up there from which to view the world around me. The sky's the limit!

External validation vs. self-validation

When things went south for me and S., we tried to get help. We asked my (now our) GP and it turned out his office mate did couples therapy so we went to see him a few times, maybe four times in total. Her biggest beef as told to him was that I did not know when to leave her alone, that she was prone to being overwhelmed by her own internal emotional tsunamis, and that I needed to learn to just get out of the way and let it pass. My biggest beef with her was that I was hurt by her capricious behaviour, I saw it as disrespectful and could not understand why she thought it was acceptable to treat me the way she did.
When we first started dating, when I was still walking on air, she really did behave like someone who genuinely cared about me. But the shine quickly wore off, and we entered a co-dependency spiral. I fell into the worst kind of validation trap, increasingly desperately seeking (and being denied) external validation from what ought to have obviously been such an unlikely, dysfunctional source. What I did not realise then was that my dependency on external validation is inherently destructive, and no amount of approval from S. would ever have been enough for me anyway. I have to learn to self-validate.

Brick Therapy

I am very fortunate to have my sister K. during times in my life when I am struggling. Not only is she an inspirational role model for me, but she is also a valuable advisor with keen insight. She has long been my one of my closest confidantes, and my only confidante in my family really. She is very charitable with her time when I need her, despite being the focal point of a busy family of her own, and regardless of how monotonous my lunacy must seem at times. Her attitude is very down-to-earth towards most situations, and she has little trouble seeing and cutting through crap to get to the heart of most things. Her advice to me thus tends to be of the "give your head a shake" variety. One of the things she has recommended for me several times in our recent conversations has been something she calls Brick Therapy. Curious enough about what that might entail, I googled it and indeed it looks intriguing from what I can understand. Even if I never have to resort to such radical therapy, it is reassuring to know there are always a few more arrows in the quiver.

Crowded

Yesterday was the national holiday, and I went with my friends PM and SC to a huge concert to see a big band at a former air base at the edge of the city. It was a whole-day holiday affair, being a Friday, and we did it up nicely with beers and an all-afternoon barbequeue on PM's deck before jumping on the subway and heading up to the show. And it was chaos by the time we got there -- we got split up when we exited the subway and headed for the shuttle buses, which were packed to the roof like everything else but which nonetheless got us to the show. Once we got there we were tied down in the beer lineups, waiting for the main act to come on, which they eventually did, and eventually SC and I were able to worm our way up to the absolute front of the crowd where we partied like we had no idea because essentially we had no idea.
It was probably the largest crowd I have ever been in, and an homogeneous one at that composed almost entirely of 20something working class and small town hosers. I was overcome by a similar feeling as had almost felled me the previous evening of being an ill-fitting outsider with no connection to the group, even though the group was so different. It is as if no matter the nature of the group, I want to belong, and I do not fit in.

Branding, part I: Future Ghosts

I mentioned that my friend LB, who coördinated the renovation and staging of my house for the sale, had started a couple of businesses -- in fact each time I see her she seems to have branched out into something new. When we first met she was beginning the home staging but by the time we reconnected in the spring and I hired her to stage the house, she had launched her "personal branding" business. I am possibly more of a candidate for a "life coach" than a brand consultant, but close enough, and her track record was unassailable, so once the dust had settled from the sale, both in my house and in my head, and I felt like I was ready for the next step, I asked her what she thought she could do for me. She arranged for me to meet her last Thursday for a drink after work at a fancy, members-only club in a trendy part of town near her apartment.

I arrived early, in my new suit, chosen by P. and test-driven a few weeks previously at the national policy convention, and found myself nervously and self-consciously nursing a pint and waiting for her on the sunny rooftop patio, feeling for all the world like the ultimate outsider among a tightly-knit clique. But before I could twist such superficial alienation into full-blown loners, LB arrived and I was back at ease, safe in the warm envelope of our the profound connection I find I share with her.

And with that simple blueprint unfolded a delicious and unforgettable evening, all within the tiny radius of a few hundred square metres, as we carved a path from roof, to patio, to bar, and briefly to her apartment, riding the intoxicating highs of her unarrestable and almost unlimited ambition for herself, and her genuine, infectious enthusiasm for me and my incredible potential. She laid bare for me the absurdity of my insecurity considering my advantages and my talents, and made such a simple, indisputable case for recognising that my only obstacle is myself. At one point she led me on a Dickensian tour of the ghosts of my past, present, and future, whereupon she walked me around the bar and contrasted me with the local barflies, whose refinement compared extremely unfavourably with mine, but whose confidence and thus track record nonetheless dwarfed mine. I was close, she took me right to the edge of the water and I could see the entire picture, but I was still frozen on the shore, on the sidelines.

Lesson 2: Self-love

The second lesson is another one which I mistakenly (and arrogantly) thought I had learned without doing any real work - the importance of self-love. This one I have been kicked with a few times - I have to learn it in stages. The first error was thinking that since I was happy, and everything seemed to be going my way, that I must have learned to love myself. Wrong! When I met S., I was riding a wave of mania: my reserves of self-esteem seemed boundless, my insecurities completely inevident. I felt neither lonely nor desperate, and as a result I did not notice when I committed to an inappropriate relationship with someone who was so obviously selfish and dysfunctional. My need for external validation trumped my instincts which told me that her love for me was disingenuous. I ignored the warning signs, even when others pointed them out to me, and I clearly still did not like myself enough at the time to permit myself to let that train go past and wait for the next one. The results were disastrous: a slow, steady, relentless, unwavering, inexorable and unarrestable descent back into self-loathing and depression, from which there was no escape for either of us other than painful separation.

But even after all that, when I first broke up with S., I was going around telling people that I felt like I finally understood the importance of loving oneself and the danger of looking outside oneself for the solution to loneliness -- but I still did not actually get it!

Lesson 1: Boundaries

My first important lesson in the immediate aftermath of my breakup with S. was the importance of establishing and maintaining interpersonal boundaries between myself and those around me. I learned and understood right away the boundaries I needed to start enforcing to keep me from owning part of her dysfunction -- in fact that was really a prerequisite for breaking up in the first place. Without that framework to lean on, I could not have carried through with it as I did during the crucial initial days.
The biggest surprise for me though was not learning the utility of a well-situated boundary with S., but realising how universally applicable the concept of personal boundaries was, and that more of my current boundaries were either grossly misplaced or glaringly absent. I was a bit stunned to discover that despite my having cut contact with S., my father was not only in touch with her, but visiting her regularly, driving her places, and even babysitting V. for her. I made an interesting decision in how I chose to respond to that: rather than angrily lecturing him about loyalty or the inappropriateness of his behaviour, I calmly told him about the boundary I had established between me and S., explained to him my determination not to violate it, and suggested to him that he therefore be deliberate in deciding which side of that boundary he chose to spend his time on.
As difficult as maintaining such separation is, it is at least a simple and elegant script to follow, and I did an excellent job of it at first. But after she moved out -- around the corner -- I perhaps became a bit cocky or complacent. As I sifted through the shards of my half of our broken life together, I incautiously dabbled in a sort of casual contact regimen with my now-neighbour S.: offering to return things of hers I had discovered, answering her calls, texts and emails, installing, replacing and then removing a sign on her house for the federal election, going out of my way to bike or drive past her house to get to mine, even accepting and eating food (a well-chosen favourite selection from her enviable repertoire) which she made for and offered to me one day. Boundary breaches can go either way, and one can invite the other: I allowed her in, but I also failed to prevent myself from crossing the line as I reached out. She very quickly managed to sneak back underneath my skin: just an inch or two, but far enough to undo a lot of work which had only recently been done. She is a resourceful woman and has a tremendous ability to effect a remarkable amount of emotional leverage with even the tiniest purchase.
I was much better at maintaining an appropriate boundary with my father, although that was quite painful for him at first, and there is a real risk of more pain for both of us down the road. And my boundary with S. is more or less back in place: I have been very disciplined about not letting her in, but boundaries work both ways, and the part I still struggle with is preventing myself from straying out across the line -- I still catch myself walking down to the corner hoping to see her, or reaching for the phone to call and hear her voice. Clearly some of the damage that was done turned out to be far more difficult to repair after the breach than it had been to establish in the first place.

Father's Day (S., part II)

After what I wrote earlier about looking forward and not backward, it makes very little sense for me to be writing once more about S., but bear with me.
Last Sunday -- father's day -- I went to my sister K.'s for a barbecue with my stepdaughter J. Remarkably it was the first time I had introduced J. to K., which is kind of strange considering what focal points the two of them have been in my life. It was a nondescript dinner with her family but it was still like some kind of big step as it felt like I was introducing a new girlfriend or something but even more important than that as J. has really become like a daughter and not a transient part of my life. Girlfriends come and go, unfortunately, but J. is family and our relationship feels somehow permanent, even more so than that I share with some of my actual family.
I dropped J. off at her place and came home and as I was getting out of the truck I bumped into my neighbour LD. and her fiancé. LD is someone I have such a tremendous amount of respect and affection for, she is one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever met. She invited me to join them on the patio at the end of my street for a "father's day" dinner which for them would have been a bit of a break considering they have six children between them. I actually turned them down initially and said something like "if I get lonely I might join you" which of course is exactly what happened the second I stepped in the house and in fact I was so quick to change my mind that when I got there I could not find them as they had not even settled in to the pub yet, with he going home for a sweater and she down the street for some money or something.
We were joined by another neighbour, and we talked about all kinds of stuff, we talked about a lot but of course we talked about S., and then suddenly there she was, with V., walking along the sidewalk beside the patio. And then V. said hello to me, and I said hello back, and just when we all thought the awkward moment had passed, she appeared, at our table, asking me why I had not returned her call from that morning, and when I planned on doing so. I was a bit stunned and unable to respond coherently at first and I think she sensed my discomfort and kept pushing me for an answer, which she never got. She was quite aggressive, quite rude and quite possibly drunk, and I was quite shaken. And of course I am quite curious about what she wants to talk about, but so far have resisted the temptation to find out.

Squishing Thoughts Like Bugs

I read on site somewhere about a cognitive technique where the guy said he dealt with bad thoughts by squishing them like bugs, grabbing them right out of the air like flies and crushing them in his hands or even hurling them to the ground and stomping on them. This has probably been the most effective technique for me of the ones I have tried through the course of my recent slump. The problems are all upstairs, in your own head, and if the thought is distorted, it can be dangerous and should be stopped in its tracks. What have I gained from years of wallowing in pain? Nothing. Worse than nothing, I have made it a habit, with a perverse reward structure of some kind, like the almost-good part of the ache from listening to nostalgic music. Remember kids, the "alg" part of that word is the word for pain in Greek.

Full Houses

One piece of advice I keep hearing from various quarters, but especially and particularly from my sister K., is that I am always trying to hard, and thinking, analysing and worrying too much. Relax, she says, keep doing the things you like to do, focus on things you can control and the things you do well, and things will fall into place. Her favourite way of illustrating this phenomenon is a phrase she picked up from her husband while playing poker: "Full houses just happen". Stay in the game and eventually you are going to be dealt a winning hand.

It follows from this that one should avoid worrying about the poor hands one gets along the way. It is easy to get distracted, to lose perspective and dedicate an inordinate amount of time and energy to causes which demonstrably do not merit the effort. One must recognise the futility in such a course and also the dangers of becoming thus sidetracked: the time it consumes takes one away from the table and out of the game for longer than it is worth. And the resultant frustration from the inevitable failure saps ones confidence precisely when it is most needed, as it is the essential ingredient to success.

This approach dovetails with another ubiquitous nugget of wisdom: the path to happiness and the solution to loneliness lie within oneself and cannot, no matter what, be achieved through others. Stated another way: you cannot love another until you truly love yourself.
Solution? Work on yourself, make yourself the best person you can be, and your ship (i.e. full house) will come in.

Fellow Travellers

I went to the nation's capital this past weekend to attend a national political convention. I am a member of the executive on the board of my local riding association, a position which really sounds more prestigious than it is -- while our party is competitive nationally, we have very little support in my riding and our group is very small.
I started to get involved in politics a couple of years ago as part of an ongoing effort to meet new and perhaps more like-minded people after realising that I found myself increasingly ideologically at odds with most of the people I identified as my friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

I was quite excited in the months leading up to the convention, especially after we won an election a month beforehand, meaning we would be gathering not only as comrades but as celebrants of a great victory. And as I said, the local pool where I am from is very small, so there I would have the opportunity to meet and share my enthusiasm with hundreds of fellow party members from across the country. I made the weekend a focal point of my entire spring: I put myself on the wagon and on a diet for the entire month of May, I had my friend P. take me shopping and choose an entire wardrobe for the trip, I booked a room in a beautiful, old, railway-built hotel.

As it turned out, I enjoyed myself at the convention and managed to avoid succumbing to any acute attacks of loners and/or sadders. Despite meeting lots of people and having a great night hopping from party to party in my new suit on Friday night, I was still somewhat disappointed that I did not make any solid connections and had to content myself with what was otherwise a very satisfying, outgoing experience. My confidence was not bulletproof, but it was nonetheless pretty solid, and thankfully I held it pretty level for most of the trip.

The next night I was unexpectedly back home and was thus able to attend a birthday party for my friend N.'s brother. He was turning 30, and N., who is the girlfriend of a good friend of mine closer to my age, is even younger than that, as are most of her friends. I still had some shiny new clothes left over from my shopping spree with P., and I showed up in good spirits and looking sharp. I have long teased N. that she really should make more of an effort to set me up with one of her many friends, and she has long responded back that for the most part her friends find me to be creepy. But a funny thing happened that night: I managed to make a whole new impression on several of N.'s friends who had been repeatedly put off by me in the past, to the point where more than one of them made a point of telling her the next day how surprised and impressed they were with me that night. And all I did was take a minute to refine my grooming, stay reasonably sober, and maintain that confidence, with a dash perhaps of nonchalance to remind myself not to take myself so seriously and just enjoy the ride.

Dizzying Heights & the Midas Touch

While the dizzying heights I reached during the months following the breakup were exhilarating, they were also, naturally, dizzying, and it was thus perhaps inevitable that I would find myself stalling and falling back to earth. The big danger is of course a total crash, and while I seem frequently to have come frighteningly close to one of those, I have thankfully always managed to avoid it. I read something recently - I think it was in a New Yorker story - where the person remarks how easy it is when one is finally happy after a long period of sadness to fall into the trap of thinking that one has found the answer and that one will never be sad again. Well I fell for it, again. I tell myself that each time I am better equipped at dealing with the darkness, but I am never sure about that really, and in any case it is too early too tell - the proof is in the pudding, and right now it is more like morass than dessert.
Focus on the future and going forward, and do not dwell on the past.
I undertook to consciously rebuild myself in preparation for the new life - the purposeful life. I made an appointment with my GP, thinking a physical would be a sensible component of a fresh start. I readily agreed to the request to wait a few weeks rather than be squeezed in as I felt no rush. Of course by the time I got in to see him on Wednesday, I had started to wobble and in the end our meeting was devoted almost exclusively to discussing my psychological health. This was not extraordinary as he has always functioned as my first line mental health care worker, meeting with me before recommending some of the other people and places I have visited on my bumpy road. He now had the added insight of having S. and V. as patients, not to mention having the file his partner kept for the handful of couples counselling sessions S. and I had attended when I still hoped to find a "together" solution to our pain.
I told Dr. R. about how I had soared so high like an eagle in the initial days and weeks, how I felt like I had the Midas Touch, and how somehow I had slipped and how suddenly everything seemed to be turning to lead instead of gold. I explained that I was feeling more comfortable with and even confident in using cognitive techniques à la Dr. Burns, such as identifying cognitive distortions in my thinking. He was very positive and made me feel like I could see the light at the end of the tunnel, that I might have finally lassoed the black dogs and all that was left to do was learn the final delicate tricks of keeping them thus at bay.