Every morning, as I wake up, like a long stare directly at the sun, the thought of Her not being with me rips me up like a sun hot knife through my mind and my heart. I chase the thoughts of Her out of my mind and almost right away start feeling guilty as if, somehow, doing so would mean betraying Her.
There is no rhyme or reason to this belief. In fact, She would prefer that I forget Her out right. But I can no more loosen myself from the gilded chains of my memories of Her than I can forget about the piercing shine of the Sun in my eyes. I revel in my pain, I hold on to it because letting go of it would mean letting go of Her.
So yesterday I mentioned about how being super busy was not leaving me any time to obsessively think about my failed relationship with the love of my life. It would seem, however, that this energy had to go somewhere and so I woke up at 4 am with a stomach ache that quickly turned into a full blown panic attack (not just an anxiety one) which finally culminated in me passing out on the bathroom floor. Good times!
And so starts a week of being busy every waking hour. My hope is that I will be too busy to think about Her.
I will try to keep posting if only to make status updates.
I may not have high hopes but I will be OK if my simple hopes of making it through the next two weeks without being constantly miserable will come true.
On the advice of my mind technician, I am supposed to repeat this mantra every time I have an anxiety attack. So far they (the mantra repetitions) work on the physiological level. My heartbeat slows down and gets back to normal but the emotional darkness remains. Though the attack has passed, the thoughts that triggered it are still weighing heavily upon my soul. My soul yearns for You, my darling. It wants to tear out of my chest and fly to You! I have been away from You for over two months and the pain of our separation is just as unbearable now as it was then. Everyone is telling me to move on and to find someone new but as much I try to look at other women, none compare to You. How can I move on if that means letting go of Your memory?
This morning my mind treated me to another panic attack. Like a broken record my mind goes back to my emotional wound and starts picking on it. I had to run to the bathroom out of sight of my colleagues. Why did I have to fall in love?
Fortunately or unfortunately, I am not confused in my feelings that preoccupy me the most. I am in love. I am in love with someone who does not want me. Someone who asked me not to contact her ever again. I know what I want the most. And that is something I can never have.
What I am not so clear about is where to go from here. How am I supposed to live if the one person I want to live for does not care if I live or die?
I miss her but I know I will never hold her in my arms again.
The feeling that something is going wrong has been really quite persistent as of late. I feel that I am settling back in my old way of being and thinking.
This needs to be further explored. However, all I can think about is Her and how I still love Her.
It is as if the two problems (preexisting depression and heartbreak) are keeping me stuck in one place and each is not letting me get past the other. Not sure what to do at this stage…
The Self – that most elusive of notions. How do we define it? Is it the soul, the mind, the id, the ego? Is it set for all time or is it constantly in flux? Then there is the whole notion of fractured Self. It is also intrinsically linked with how we view ourselves: for example, whether do we feel young or old regardless of actual age;
In my case, I am starting to realise that my Self is not what I thought it was. In fact, the current state of feeling totally lost is because I spent a large portion of my life hiding my Self from the world and myself. I have written about myself here before but I am realising that I have not really touched on the subject of my Self. I have no clue what or who I am. Is it the Me the funny guy? Is it the Me the improviser? Is it the Me the climber?
Some people (ahem, me) tend pile up stuff in a closet during cleanup and just shut the door. Later, when that was thoroughly forgotten, the closet gets opened and everything that was piled up falls out. Since I have started doing improv, I feel that is the psychological equivalent of what has been happening in my mind. The recent Breakup just swung all the doors open and now I am drowning in all the emotional baggage that was suppressed there.
And yet, I am still having trouble confronting my issues. Is it because I am afraid to find out that I am a total loser? Granted, that is not the kind of validation I am interested in. I do know that feelings of low self-worth and fears of inadequacy are my constant companions, à la Dexter’s “dark passenger.”
So I am considering the possibility that my Self is in a transitional period. I am changing from the Self I deluded myself into and moving towards discovering my true Self. Hopefully, this will not end in bitter disappointment.
Some days are better, some are worse. Today is a bad one. There is a lot of anxiety, and stress, and sadness. This is one of those days when I feel Her absence stronger than most days. If only I could hear Her voice reassuring me that everything is going to be OK… Alas, as I am freaking out in my room, all there is is a ringing silence.
I also feel that I desperately need a drink. I’m hoping to be able to resist. Trying to kill this pain with booze is a road that leads to way worse shit than I already am in up to my neck.
As stupid and unhealthy as it is, I can not not think about Her and tell myself that She won’t be there when I come through. I need Her!
It is as stormy outside as it is in my mind. I miss Her so much. I miss Her so much. Yet I know that She will never want me but I cannoy stop thinking about Her. Every day something new reminds me of Her and I just stop in my tracks. I am stuck in the feedback loop that would make the main character in Groundhog Day run back to his vicious circle. What am I doing wrong? How do I make this torture stop?
There has got to be a better way than these constant anxiety attacks punctuated by the gut punching knots of pain and sorrow. At times, I get so worked up in this stress that my throat and chest muscles start hurting as if I had been attached to a wheel by my back and just rolled around.
I want to be able to enjoy the things I have always enjoyed but like the record player spinning an overly used vinyl, my mind’s needle keeps skipping a groove and just plays the old tune of loss over, and over, and over again. I desperately want to reach out and move the record player’s arm to the next groove, or better yet, a completely new song but I am waving my arms in the pitch black hoping to find a way out of this mess.
Patriotism. It has been called everything from the refuge of the weak-minded to the greatest virtue. Patriotism though cannot be defined so simply. We all have our own version of that concept. We understand it differently through various mind prisms of life experiences, upbringing, religion, philosophy, and metaphysics.
The reason many of us define patriotism differently is because people disagree on what is most important to their country. I have a number of friends who claim to not be patriotic at all because they do not like the way things are and want them to change. I would posit that this is still patriotism. They want things to be different, to be better for their country and regardless of whether their particular beliefs are right or wrong or whether they consider themselves patriotic, they are patriotic.
Here is my recipe for healthy patriotism.
Social Contract.
As members of society we tacitly or explicitly (especially in cases of immigration) accept the social contract of our respective societies. Citizens of the United States of America pledge allegiance to the flag and constitution. Citizens of Canada pledge allegiance to the Queen and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the society is so much more than that. We sometimes forget that there are certain national cultural values that exist and it is *our* responsibility to know them and respect them.
Civility.
We are all different. We are all snowflakes. We look differently, we think differently, we express ourselves differently. Perhaps it is not so but it seems sometimes that we have are losing the tradition of civil discourse. We do not discuss, we argue. We listen just long enough and attentively enough to object. Let us get that back. We will all be better for it.
Civics.
One of the problems that is observed throughout western societies is that people are not well versed in the subject of Civics. We do not sufficiently know how our own countries, our own governments function. There are a couple of wonderful videos where actor Richard Dreyfuss explains the importance of that subject. So rather than let me try to do it, I will turn it over to the master:
Education.
Education is the cornerstone of a successful society. How can we even begin to understand the concepts of governance and patriotism without knowing the history of those concepts. This does not mean that I value humanities over science. The logic inherent in science, especially mathematics and physics is paramount to being able to reason logically about subjects that cannot be easily defined. They are also important when it comes to understanding economics. Claiming to be a patriot but not to care at all about one’s country’s economic and monetary policy is an insanity, especially in the light of the current recession and its causes. Everyone apparently has a opinion on what the governments should do about the recession but ask many of the people what their thoughts are on the current monetary policy of their government or even who is in charge of it and you will get blank stare.
Freedom of speech and expression.
This ties in with previously mentioned subjects of civility, Civics, and the social contract. We can all scream and seethe at each other from our respective camps but that will not get us anywhere. Without being able to express ourselves, we cannot move forward as a society. And yes, I do count hate speech as an important function of this. I know I am about to lose great many of you but consider this: banning hate speech will not make it magically disappear. In fact, it is impossible to ban hate speech; we can only ban public expression of it. And that my friends, is equivalent to sticking our proverbial heads in the sand. Hate speech is rooted in ignorance and the only way to fight against it is with education not the with silence and ineffective laws.
I am not being merely academic about this. I grew up in the country where I was hated and discriminated against (sometimes publicly) based on my ethnicity. So I have experienced racism and I still say let the assholes spew their hatred. Forbidding them to speak in public will not make them change their minds.
So these are the ingredients for healthy patriotism. The cooking methods can be multiple but the constant must always be respect for others, knowledge to empower change, and earnest will to make life better for everyone and not just the people who agree with you.
Forlorn Hope: A Diary Of A Broken Heart 