my life... the musical

Music has always been an essential part of my existence. Even when I was young - only country music was allowed in our home, so I would spend hours in my parents bedroom with my mother's collection of 12" vinyl. Waylon and Willie and their highway songs, Merle Haggard and his haggard voice, the classic and sort of goofy Oak Ridge Boys, Dolly Parton and her coat of many colors, Johnny Cash and his prison blues, John Denver and his sweet innocence. Some of it was new and exciting. The ever-rowdy Hank Jr., and a fledgling band called Alabama.

I needed the music. I would have needed it no matter what it was. If I had been relegated to only hearing opera or reggae or cheesy 80's hair bands, the music would have meant just as much. We need music, like we need air and water.

A long while ago I told Courtney that I would make her a CD- my life story in music. I attempted several times, but found it difficult. And quickly realized that it was going to be a sad album. But at most moments in my life, as is the case with everyone I think, there was often a song that just said everything perfectly. Better than I ever could.
Bear with the cover songs if they are not your preferred versions- they are the versions that struck me.

I began with the characters in my life.

First there was my mother...


And my father...


And life in our secluded home. (I'm bummed the original video was pulled from Youtube :(


Martina McBride always resonated with my mother. After 33 1/2 years of marriage, she picked a new song for herself. She chose this one:


Though there was plenty of running and flashing lights, it wasn't as fiery on the outside as it was on the inside. I spiraled into suicidal hate.
I sat on the bus on the way to basketball games, my head against the window and clutching my discman, spinning a copy of Silverchair's Frogstomp. I daydreamed.
(Video is pretty gruesome, don't watch if you find gore triggering)

That place was so dark. For years, the only image I could muster that brought me any joy at all was to picture myself lifeless in a pool of my own blood. When I was 16 one of my friends, the most alive and joyful person I had ever known, was killed. I couldn't understand. Why her and not me? Why did she have to die when she loved life so much, and I had to go on hating mine?
I wanted this song played at my funeral:


My existence was so precarious, every day was such a struggle to simply survive. I teetered along a very fine line... and might not have survived if not for Alanis and her least popular record, Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie.

She knew where I was, and she was fighting too. She gave me hope.
Years later I would have the opportunity to meet her and tell her this. She looked very deeply into my eyes and we understood each other in a grand cosmic sense. Her chords resonated through us both, connecting our hearts and brains and consciousness in C major vibrations.
My lyrical relationship with her never failed me. Wherever her album was, I was. She expressed my thoughts with an uncanny accuracy. When she was angry, I was angry. When she was suffering from crippling depression, so was I. When she began to grow and work through it... I did too. I started to understand.

When she found peace, I found peace.
By the time So-Called Chaos came out, I was in college and had spent years in therapy. I left my home town and never went back again.

I tell people that I remember taking my first breath.
I was 18, outside my freshman dorm. It was a warm spring day and the sun was shining through the leafy oak trees. My heart swelled in a way that I feared it might burst. I had never felt this before! It startled the tears from my eyes when I realized what the sensation was... I was happy. I had never felt it before. I then knew I could survive anything. And I knew how.

"Out is Through," I tattooed across my right foot. I see it every day when I shower, and it reminds me to put my best foot forward. No matter what you've been through or what you're running from, there's only one way to make it better. You can't hide from it or ignore it or tuck it neatly beneath the couch. No matter what you do, it's there. The only way out is through.

On the first day of my junior year of college, I fell in love. Having considered myself heterosexual (unsuccessful though that was) until this point, it rocked my sense of self. My first true love was a woman. And a woman who could never be mine.
My confusion and depression returned in full force. I began drinking heavily and was hospitalized multiple times. My feelings came to light and things went from awful to worse. I lost a friend and a mentor along with my pride and self-esteem.
I tried to make light of the subject by stating that this was our song:


But in reality, Alanis was right again. She formed the sentences that I could not.

"If I had a bill for all the philosophies I shared
If I had a penny for all the possibilities I presented
If I had a dime for every hand thrown up in the air
My wealth would render this no less severe."

I was at more risk than I had ever been. This time I had my own gun.

It was a Ruger.

For years I saw Lisa's face in crowds, driving in cars I passed on the road. Even when I moved to the other side of the country, she was all around me. Grad school was the perfect excuse. I ran.

The song is cliche and overplayed. It would be on every Boston college student's list. But it's perfect. And it's beautiful.


And I did start a new life. I left Colorado and continued to work on myself. I fell in and out of love. Beautiful people touched me and changed my life. The more I loved myself, the more I was finally able feel. I understood what my father had done to me, to us, and I could finally put my anger where it should have been all along.


Apocalyptica (who I like to call "the male Rasputina") released a song in 2009 with the help of Three Days Grace vocalist Adam Gontier that made me realized how I now felt about my father. The shame and sadness was but a small footnote to how it really felt: vindicating.

Corey Taylor sang with them for "I'm not Jesus," and it was brutally honest as well. But there was one difference in the lyrics... I will forgive.
I have forgiven him.

It's been years since I've felt suicidal. It's just not an option anymore.
I am happy.
All I want now is so simple...


And I am.

OK, that is.

:)

the hungry ghosts

The long dead and buried have been surrounding my bed as my head hits the pillow each night. Memories of moments I had forgotten, the sounds of places I left long ago.
The smoke swirls around me... illuminating the dark, entering through my nose in white wisps and escaping through my mouth.

I smell the wood stove burning. My mother's footsteps are quick, light, with purpose. Somehow, they contain comfort. Happiness.
My father's footsteps are slow. Deliberate. Like the steady gait of a lumbering movie monster that you cannot escape no matter how you run. I peer over my blue-and-white-checked bedspread at the black outside the door and hope that he is not coming for me.
If places really do retain residual energy the pine logs and aspen paneling of this house, my father's handmade creation, are steeped in fear and loathing. I hear their voices. I hear his voice.
At the pinnacle of our pentagon-shaped living room, above the archaic television, hangs the robust head of a 7-point bull elk in full bugle. To his right, a pronghorn antelope above a chair and an old green rotary phone. My father's worn, rusty-orange recliner completes the wall... adjunct to one entrance to the kitchen and never far from the cheap beer in the refrigerator. Coors Light, then Keystone Light, and in the last years Black Label.
I don't remember a time when I didn't feel the fear. It's a deep, innate fear that feels as though it has been in this soul longer than this soul has been in this body. I know, as a child, that someday he will kill me.
Distance is all that buffers this feeling now.

The mist billows into clouds above my bed, storms of lightning sparking, too bright to be shut out by closed eyelids. It shows me, projecting on the scrim beyond my eyes.

my first angry taste of whiskey... I couldn't understand why it was all he did. Alone in this place, I grabbed the bottle of Jim Beam at 12 and drank a swallow I sputtered, my eyes watered and my throat burned. I knew then why he added water. To this day it tastes like regret.

praying that he wouldn't beat me in front of my friends on my birthday... his favorite mule attacked and trampled me, though he only saw the rock I threw at her. My hysteria and the hoofprints on my back perhaps saved me, though the screaming and bruising from his hands was embarrassing still.

he had a knack for hitting a pop fly straight to me... a skill I inherited, or perhaps learned, from him. He was able to restrain his insults when we played catch. He was a dad.

I could never recall the reason, but the "discipline" was frequent. The belt was his favorite implement; the extra terror it created with the dramatic snap-snap-snap through the belt loops... the irony of him beating me with large buckles I gave him for father's day was lost on me until years later.

when I was in third grade a visiting girl I couldn't stand let my crush on Josh Kealing slip. My father told me if I were dating a boy he would kill us both with his shotgun.

approaching our new home, face growing redder in both fear and shame as I slowly recognized my childhood belongings thrown into the snow on the lawn. He had perhaps felt bad about telling me "whin I DIE you will git your teddy bear"... but not that bad. I turned and looked around at the deserted street. I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck, watching me from somewhere as I herded my ruined childhood into my mother's house.

waiting. Waiting in those stained purple chairs in Pueblo Hospital to see if my mother was going to live or leave me.

sitting next to my niece at the foot of the guest-bedroom bed, Super Nintendo controllers clutched desperately in our hands. Our attention focused so completely on Mario, Yoshi, and their alien worlds, ignoring the anger and insanity. Not listening, not watching, forgetting when my brother threw her mother down the stairs of their trailer and broke her arm. I could not ignore my hatred for him.

the peace that existed on the back of a horse. Watching the Continental Divide jut through the cerulean blue sky... gazing into the mountain-top crater lakes, seeing every fish in the clear green water... looking down at the patchwork quilt of potato fields across the valley... stopping in silent prayer to the orange embers and heaven-bound sparks of the crackling camp fire... the horses were our hooved sentinels, snorting in the night...

In my small life I learned. I engaged my curiosities and absorbed the world around me. I dove into Zoobooks and Audobon illustrated guides to birds and rocks, reptiles and amphibians. I practiced with my bow and arrow, though not as much as my father would have liked. I tucked-and-rolled when thrown from the horses, but could not dodge and weave from his crushing hands. My door locked with much persistence and force, but more with luck. I became terribly ill and stayed that way for years, drowning in acid from my burning, nauseous stomach.

GoogleEarth tells me that the log house at 5315 County Road 14 still stands, as does the barn and tack-room. The six ponds across the street have nearly withered to dust. The boards of my tree-house are rotted and grown over. Surely he wooden slats of the bridge across Pinos Creek have long-since been replaced.
The dark, overgrown tunnel of foliage enveloping the river was ominous to 7-year olds. I told my friends a tale of a witch who lived beneath the boards that was purely farce but frightening enough to make me speed away with a look over my shoulder each time I rode past it on my bicycle.

But there were specters who followed me home. Spirits that clung to me as I escaped to far northeastern reaches. The boards and cement of this old cabin do not retain this haunting.

This haunting is mine.

ignorant bliss

I've spent a lot of time in the past six months talking and thinking about the expectations I have of others.
Those who know me well enough to know my fears (which I'm not sure is anyone these days, perhaps excluding my therapist), know that one of my biggest fears is having a radically inaccurate view of myself. Being deluded, being unable to be objective.
Many of us, maybe all of us, have expectations of others that we are not always able to live up to ourselves. When this happens we engage in impressive mental gymnastics, rationalizing and flat-out making excuses until our own behavior is acceptable and no longer causing us any cognitive dissonance. It works, as long as we don't think about things too hard. It makes us hypocrites.
Whenever I find myself pained by people and so very disappointed in them, I have to question my place. Who am I to judge? How can I feel disappointed in others when I am so very far from perfect?
Last week my therapist commented on something I've known for a long time.
"No matter how many times it happens, you always seem surprised when people let you down." I agreed that my ability to be both cynical and naive at the same time is... interesting.
No matter what I witness or experience, I expect the best from others. I want to believe my clients when they explain away and rationalize their despicable deeds. I want to believe that they can do better, and never hurt anyone again. I want to believe that they are good. And I do. I believe it and believe it and believe it again, no matter how many times I'm proven wrong.
I can't help but wonder if, when my optimism will run out.

I find myself devastated by people in my life when they don't live up to my expectations. Disappointed equals unreasonably devastated. I should be able to accept their shortcomings as human nature, as I am intimately familiar with my own terribly human nature. I've done things I am deeply ashamed of, things that I might not be so understanding of in others.

But there is a lot of space between cynicism and naivete.
While it would not be practical or fulfilling to always expect the worst, it's also impractical to always expect the best. It is, unfortunately, unreasonable to expect everyone to treat others with respect. To consider the feelings of people that they do not know. To hold loyalty and honesty in the highest regard. To hold emotions as most valuable and seek vulnerability and transparency. I cannot expect these sorts of things.
Can I expect them from myself? I try very hard to hold myself to these standards. Sometimes I fail. But I hope... god, I hope that more often than not I succeed. Whether it's reasonable or not, I must continue to have expectations for myself that are the highest I can imagine. It's the only way we get better.

Is having the highest expectations of others the way to have better relationships?

self harm

It's no secret that I'm weird.
It's a shame (I guess) that we're never able to truly understand how different or similar we are from other people, since we can never experience the inner workings of another person. We only know how we feel.
From an early age I've had a problem. A problem that I used to loathe and railed against with all my might in my teenage years. I fought to deaden myself, to feel nothing, to shut it all off... because the truth was, and is, I feel a lot. I mean, A LOT. Probably too much. And almost definitely an unnatural amount.
I know I've written of it before, but I'll always remember the first moment I realized that I my feelings were not only my own.
I feel other people's anger, and (especially) anxiety. Sometimes headaches. Other body aches.
In talking with a friend this evening and my therapist Monday night, I explained that I have a problem with emotional individuation. Perhaps it's because of these things mentioned above. I have difficulty seeing the difference between my own feelings, as far as worth/relevance/intensity, and the feelings (or circumstances) of others. My therapist pointed out that it's part of the reason, actually a large part, of why I donated a kidney. I didn't see the difference between the suffering of a stranger and my own. "No, it wasn't happening to you," she said, "But it could. And that effects you just as much."
There are things that I have never experienced myself, but I have an extraordinarily strong, negative, emotional response to them. The two biggest things are rape/sexual abuse and infidelity. Two things I have thankfully never experienced first hand. But seeing these experiences through those around me effects me more intensely than I think a first-hand experience actually would.
Sometimes the experiences of others, particularly of people I love, affect me far more than my own. It's likely because I've spent most of my life having a far easier time having compassion for others than for myself.
Most of us are better at giving advice to others than following the same good advice ourselves. I have spent many years feeling love for others that I did not have for myself. Today this is no longer the case, but there are still some Swiss-cheese holes in my emotional landscape. Poverty of things I just cannot experience for myself.
My over-identification with the problems/feelings/hurts/bad decisions/risks of others is a problem. It is one of the worst (and best) things about me. I find it difficult to explain in a way that is easily understandable to everyone, because it's not at all like what I think is "normal." Feelings sometimes rip through me. Feelings that are not even my own, situations that are not even my own, harm me. Hold me hostage. And because there appears to be little chance of my turning this off (though it has lessened, and drastically in the past three months- save for those two areas), my only means of protection is distance.
I cannot stop energies and emotions and fears and loves and angers and devastations from moving through as they please. From coming into me, wrapping fiery hands around my entrails, grinding my teeth and slamming me against walls. It sounds, I know, like something I could control, right? With education or self-care or awareness or perspective or perhaps maturity? Some of it is I'm sure. But some of it is, sadly, me. It's hardwired in the truest sense. It has likely been a defense mechanism, it has been my saving grace, it is the pool inside me from which any goodness springs.
But it is painful. And it is volatile. That warm spring might be dried, turned icy or boiling, or spew volcanic ash at a feather's touch. I have done much study about the parts of me that are learned, changeable, and the parts of me that just "are." The things I must accept and work with instead of against.
I can only control what I expose myself to.

words on paper

In it's infancy, my book is a very rough 62 pages of feelings and conversations. I have just begun to transcribe the handwritten words from a composition notebook I've been carrying with me constantly for the past four months.
It is, without a doubt, the most difficult artistic task I've ever undertaken.

Introductions are difficult.
I'm often too verbose.
I use too much foreshadowing.
Sometimes I move too quickly, skipping large chunks of my story and forcing myself to backtrack or cut and paste myself into maddening circles.

I am having difficulty weaving my story in such a way that the reader journeys with me: feeling the same excitement and growing disappointment, the same abandonment and then reckless abandon... the hurt and the resilience. I want them to understand the changes I have undergone.
I'm not even sure I understand the changes.

I am grasping to hang on to them... gripping with both hands.