8. Better

This is my share for the day. I wish the last thirty-three years or so hadn’t happened.

I wish I’d got all up in some fisticuffs with my old man when I was a teenager and lived as a hobo. I feel like that would have been truer to myself.

I wish I had been able to stand uo for myself.

I wish I had never absorbed the rampant narcissism and pervasive projection I learned from my mother.

I wish I didn't have to live with what it’s like to know that I’m that kind of guy. I hope I’m a recovering version of that now, because I try, but even that feels intolerable. It’s not quite intolerable, but man does it smart.

I wish there was some other way out than through.

I wish I had any sort of confidence that there is anything on the other side of ‘through’ and it’s not just an endless tunnel of knowing that at any moment in any conversation with anyone who matters to me I might be blinded by the personality goggles that make me feel betrayed and used.

I wish people would not tell me stupid kindergarten fortune-cookie advice like it’s that easy to fix things in your head.

See? If you try to show care for me, I might react like that, and despise you for being stupid. I despise everyone and everything for being stupid, sometimes. That’s the one thing I never thought I was.

But I wish I didn't think I was so stupid all the time now.

I wish I didn't have to embrace humility and chagrin as a way of life, but that’s how you go through the tunnel, even if the tunnel has no end. I hope that’s how it works.

I wish that when I finally actually did ‘disclose’ to my mother and tell her she wasn’t ok and my childhood was not ok, I felt better in some different way.

What I have is a feeling of relief at not maintaining the illusion in my mind that I have a mother, and not just a maternal organism.

But I also know that I was loyal to the part of me that’s a little boy and needed a Big Brother to protect him. That worked and I guess that’s why people tell you that if it’s at all possible, do some version of that. Tell the person who hurt you that they hurt you instead of denying yourself in order to maintain someone else’s illusion about themselves.

The little boy part knows that I finally stood up for him. That was like a magic trick, feeling a ton of bricks disappear off my back.

But I wish it were all different. But it’s not. I’m still me, and I have my own tunnel to get through, no one else’s.

Usually by the time I can consciously acknowledge a struggle I’m having, I have a fighting chance at success in dealing with it properly. Making things conscious in my mind seems to be the engine that moves me through the tunnel.

That’s my share for the day. Thanks for listening.