Broken

I think about death a lot.

I realize that immediately I should qualify a couple of things in that sentence. By “a lot” I don’t mean constantly, but at least daily. Every day I think about death. And when I say “death” I don’t mean to imply that I am actively considering ways to off myself, but when I am thinking about it, I’m thinking about it because I think that my life would be suddenly much better if I weren’t in it any longer.

My preferred method is to ask someone (Zeus, I think, but possibly Odin) when I go to sleep to please prevent me from re-entering this world again. I would like to no longer exist here, to no longer quest to feel good, and to fake feeling good for other people, and to finally give in to these feelings of worthlessness and despair and float off into nothingness. To not be. To cease.

Nothing violent, you understand. No gunshot wounds to the head, no slit wrists. I don’t even want to take pills that may not work. I simply wish…

Not to be.

I am in therapy now (yes, I can hear you rolling your eyes) and trying to resolve these feelings, which means to understand them. I’m not sure I can entirely eliminate them. They are…intrinsic to me now, like the way I walk or sit or stare uncomfortably at the floor. My therapist is picking at the scab, as it were, and making me bleed the stuff that is clogging up my happiness, if indeed it’s still in there at all.

I have my doubts.

I write this for a couple of reasons. Three, maybe. First, I want to understand me, and sometimes writing things down helps organize one’s thoughts into something resembling coherency. My thoughts are often twisted about the one big, dark thought and all point towards it, again and again, as the solution to everything. Maybe I can untangle them a little. Secondly, I want you to understand me. I have always wished for someone who understood me, because I have trouble understanding myself, and I certainly don’t understand all the happy, well-adjusted people walking around not thinking about being blissfully dead.

The third reason is this: Maybe there are people in your life you don’t understand. You don’t understand their motives, or their actions, why they behave the way they do in certain situations, why they are who they are. Maybe this story will illustrate what happens to the lives we build with an incomplete set of tools; what happens when we aren’t given complete blueprints and must erect it based only on what we see and what we are taught; and how those lessons are learned whether they are consciously applied by those we love or they’re not.

I’m going to start from the beginning. (It’s a very fine place to start.) When I was four years old, and not yet in kindergarten, my father died of cancer. His death was rather sudden and unexpected, and hit my mother hardest of all.

Let me step back even farther, and explain my mother a little. My grandmother (my mother’s mother) came to America to escape World War One. Her plan was simple if unoriginal; she would travel to Canada and then make her way across the border into America, whereupon she would meet a man and become pregnant. He would be forced to marry her (this being America the Puritan in the early years of the last century) so that she would then be a citizen. You have to admit that the plan avoids a lot of longish legalities and silly rules, diving right into the heart of what it means to be in love, or in pregnancy.

It came to pass that she did as she set out to do. Maybe it was brave and maybe it was foolish, but what happened next (as you would have to assume) is that my grandfather and my grandmother entered into a loveless marriage, showing little or no love or affection for each other or for my mother, an only child. They frequently fought and argued and frequently fought and argued about her and in her presence.

My mother’s childhood, therefore, and her adolescence and all the years in which she was forming her opinion of herself and the world were unhappy, lonely, sad and neglectful. Consequently, like in some bad novel, she repeated the pattern but for different reasons, falling in love and getting pregnant while still in high school with a young man of questionable morals (who was, after all, fucking little girls in the 1940s) who subsequently ran out on her, leaving her and her first child — my half-sister — alone to fend for themselves. She had no choice but to move back in with the parents who never loved, cared for, nor nurtured her.

There’s the foundation of my edifice. I can point to that if someone wants to know why and how one ends up in my emotional state or lack thereof. A loveless family raises an unloved child in a loveless marriage without love.

Fast forward ten years and my mother meets my father. By all accounts (because I have no memories of him — for reasons I shall explain shortly) he was a loving, caring, devoted and affectionate man because his family was like that, too. There were no skeletons in the closets, no escapes from Germans, no border crossings and neglected children. With him, she had my brother and I and we all moved into a ranch-style, three-bedroom house in Bakersfield, California where I was born.

Within five years, my father is dead.

This devastated my mother to the degree that her only method of coping with her new reality of being stripped once again of any love was to erase him physically in order to erase him emotionally from her memory — and ours as well. She removed all traces of him from our house. She removed his pictures from the albums. She sold or gave away all of his clothes. She could not bear to be reminded of the love she had finally found that the fates had stricken from her. Which brings me back to my lack of memories about my father.

Here’s what I remember, and this is all I remember:

• Helicopter swings in the front yard, when he would grab my wrist and ankle and swing me around.
• The smell of smoke of his breath, because he smoked a pipe.
• The gruff touch of his cheek against mine when he kissed me goodnight.

That is my father inside my head. That is all that’s left to me of him.

It’s hard for me to blame anyone for these facts. We all cope as we are able to, and we all try to go on when faced with the unbearable. I was four years old, and what was I going to do about it? Life was unfair. It was time to come to grips with that.

My mother took us all into her bedroom after he was dead and sat us all down on her California King-sized bed and said that daddy wasn’t coming home. Ever. And that we should go into our own bedrooms and think about that.

What does a four year old think about when told he should think about his father’s sudden disappearance from the home? He thinks about how long he’ll have to stay in the bedroom and he stares at the walls and wonders what he should be feeling, and that goes on for about, oh, thirty minutes and then his mother opens his bedroom door and reports that it is time to come out.

So: Grieving. Done.

I didn’t attend my father’s funeral. My brother and I — he was six — were given new GI Joe dolls to play with on our own at home while my mother and my grandparents and my great aunts and uncles went to Hillcrest Memorial Park and Mortuary to attend my father’s burial. We visited his grave a few times over the years, but those visits stopped fairly quickly, too.

Which brings us, you and I together, to the next fifty years of my life. You see, when I was a child, there was no one there. My mother needed to get a job. My sister was married and gone. My mother could not afford a nanny or a housekeeper or someone else who could surrogate for her while she tried to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Again, there’s no one to blame for these realties. They simply were. Shit happens.

So I was neither loved nor cared for. I cared for myself. I was not shown affection, and not anger or hatred either. Mostly, I was shown fear. I was taught to fear the world, because my mother could not be there to protect me from traffic, or from getting into a stranger’s car, or sticking my finger in a light socket. She told me — taught me — to fear everything, and distrust everyone.

Makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it? After all, look at her life. Whom did she have to teach her these things? Where did she learn to love and be loved? How did she manage to make it through her own life without turning into an alcoholic or a drug addict or who the hell knows what some people turn to when there’s no one there at all?

My first therapist told me that I had managed myself pretty well, all things considered. She mentioned that people often do turn to substance (and other kinds of) abuse to manage their empty lives. That I had chosen to shut everything down, turn everything off, and deny myself pleasure and affection and companionship rather than ache and pine and scream for it may have saved me.

On the other hand: daily thoughts of death. So….

I also learned, though my father and not my mother taught me this, that people will disappear at random and never come back. People you love and who you thought loved you back and would stand by you no matter what — well, sometimes? They just disappear. In a moment. And without explanation or a kiss or a hug or even a goodbye.

Leaving you alone.

When you’re four years old and you’re left alone, what do you do? What lessons do you derive from life? How do you learn about loving and being loved? About showing and receiving affection? About whom to trust, and whom to care for?

Is it an odd concept to you (assuming you are not like me) that love is something you need to learn? Did you think that love just happens, like being hungry or being scared or breathing in and out? That’s partially true, we can’t help but have feelings, but it’s the manner of how these feelings exist and manifest that we need to learn. And when no one is showing you any love, no one is embracing you, no one is telling you you’re loved, no one is tucking you in at night, no one is attaching the seatbelt across your lap, no one is there to catch you when you fall (so you better not fall) then what you learn about love comes from what you observe in other places, like TV shows and stories.

That fake, always happy ending kind of love. That love that involves two straight people kissing on a park bench and getting married and having families and no one dies, no one goes away suddenly, because they’re worthy of that love, they’ve earned it you see, they…deserve love.

And me? Well….

I used to blame a lot of my….emotional retardation on my homosexuality. Admittedly, it certainly didn’t help matters that when it came time to start having sexual feelings, and desires, and to ache for someone else to be with, I knew that I should hide all those feelings, too. I was a young, fat, myopic kid in the 1970's so I didn’t really have a lot to worry about in the whole attraction thing.

Oh, I knew pretty damned early that I liked looking at men a hell of a lot more — and in an entirely different way — than I liked looking at women. I also knew it was wrong to have those feelings. No one explicitly told me, because no one had to. Society as a whole made it clear everywhere that I was odd and broken and a freak.

No one had to tell me that.

When you’re young, or I should say when I was young, I didn’t think about or consider the reasons for my chosen life of loneliness and solitude. Some people are just that way. And I wasn’t hurting anyone (which was sort of the point) and I wasn’t feeling particularly badly (not that I had anything to compare my feelings to) so I managed to get through high school and college without ever once kissing someone else, or holding someone else’s hand, or dancing with someone else, or looking at someone else.

Life on my own inflated these personal challenges to remain alone and hide my feelings and my desires.

I’ll take a step back again here and explain that of course I have feelings, but I don’t allow myself to express them. I’m sort of like Mr. Spock, only a lot less sexy. And I’ll admit to a confusion about love. I don’t understand it. I don’t recognize it. And I do a piss-poor job of expressing it when I think I feel it.

Here’s my definition of love, and I’m not asking for yours because all love is different (isn’t it?):

Love is when you would do anything in the world for someone else, sacrifice anything, go anywhere, give them everything you own, all your money, whatever they asked for. Love is valuing someone more than you value yourself.

Having written that, it occurs to me that if that’s the case, I love everyone. Because I place everyone else above myself.

I don’t like me. That’s an essential piece of the puzzle of understanding where I come from. I don’t like me. I don’t understand why anyone else would like me, either. I understand that this is not the desired attitude or presentation that people want to have around them, so I do my best to pretend, to wear a mask, to act like everyone else does.

I’ve been trying to come to terms with that. I have never liked myself. I don’t know how other people manage that miracle, which is what it seems to me to be most of the time. I realize that if I could just…like me, many of the other problems probably wouldn’t be there.

To my friends — being the people who do like me — this is a hard concept to understand, because, well, they like me. Two of the best friends of my life admitted that when we first met, they didn’t like me, either. One said he felt like I was stuck-up, egotistic, and judgmental. The reality is that I don’t offer myself to new people openly because I don’t like myself, and those who I really want to know and am attracted to (sexually or not) compounds the problem and I tend to shut off completely from them.

So why don’t I like me? What don’t I see in myself that they see in me that makes them fall in like with me? What twisted thing operates in my head that tells me, when I wake up, or when I see myself in a mirror, or just for the hell of it to mention in passing for no reason whatever, “I don’t like you (me).”

Is it because I was never told I was good, or worthy? Was it because I wasn’t hugged or kissed, held when I was sad, praised when I did well?

Those are strangely powerful things.

But why now? I seemed to have been managing myself for all my life, and then suddenly I couldn’t any longer.

Lightning strikes more than once. Of course it does. The second time may be nothing like the first time. You may not know what it is when it hits you. You will be in shock, of course. After all, it’s lightning.

My last relationship lasted six years. It wasn’t all good, but what is? Okay, chocolate, I’ll give you that one.

Near the end of us, I think we both knew it was over. I can say that he ended it, but I agreed pretty quickly because it felt like it was over. I wasn’t in a place to be with him — or anyone — any longer, because I hated myself enough for both of us. There are many factors that lead to us being there, factors we were each bringing to the table, as well as the table itself.

But something else happened. A little thing, in the scope of it all. Something I doubt he intended, because he was never cruel to me. He was never unkind to me. I may have been cruel and unkind to him, but I was so focused on my own pain that I was blind to his.

When he ended it, he ended it cleanly and completely. He walked away from me, literally (by walking down the stairs out of my apartment and my life) and figuratively (by erasing all traces of himself from my life, and mine from his). He cut me out, probably to spare himself the pain of the ending, and to relieve himself from dealing with the sad parts.

Can you…oh…think of any other time in my life when someone I loved disappeared completely? Someone whom I trusted, someone to depend upon, someone whom I would have done anything in the world for, who was there one day and gone the next, erased from my life forever?

If he had planned it, if his intention was to destroy me, to crush me, throw me back into my childhood pit, he could not have done it better or more effectively.

That was not his intention. Does one think of things like that when you’re just trying to hold it together without exploding? One can consider the emotional shattering that occurs during the thing, but that looms so large that the cracks that develop and open up into the pits of long ago and far away aren’t considered. He did love me and I loved him. But we had grown apart, and we were bad for each other. I cannot diagnose his problems, and I could not explain my own.

Why was I growing withdrawn and dispassionate? Why did I start to cringe from his touch and get mad or angry for no reason? I didn’t know. I suspected that part of it was my insecurity and inability to trust someone else. Another part was that the trajectory of my life was headed down, and his was headed up, and I did not want to drag him down to my level and could not ask him to help lift me up to his. Because that would be a weakness, and an imperfection. I had been taught (and taught well) that life sucks, and people leave, and I had better not make any mistakes or do anything wrong, or I’ll be left alone.

Again. Alone.

Even at the time and for months and months later (as I crawled further into the pit of my creation and began losing hope and the will to keep trying) I did not make that connection. To me, and as I explained it to myself, it was my fault.

Of course it was.

Because I am a terrible person.

Unworthy of anyone’s love.

Fate, right? If I am unworthy of love, love will abandon me. And now it had, in a very complete manner. So down, down I went, withdrawing from life, from friends, from everything and everyone because I felt I would infect them, that I needed to be away from them in case they, too, understood how horrible a person I am, and then they would leave, and I would be truly, utterly alone.

None of this makes sense to you, I hope. It shouldn’t. It is not the way a healthy person reasons or behaves. It is, rather, how someone whose life has taken a turn for the worse, or maybe a careen off a cliff for the worse, or maybe a shove of the foot against the gas pedal steering the car of life into the solid brick wall for the worse, behaves.

Where am I now? What’s going to happen? What am I doing to get through this?

A lot of stumbling, actually. If I am that sapling that was bent over early in life by the strong winds of bad luck, and have subsequently grown ring after ring after ring of wood under my crusty bark, circling that pain with layers of life to cover it up without ever finding the strength (or knowing that I needed it) to straighten out that essential error in my growth and reach upwards into the bright sky instead of crawling sideways and hoping for good things to happen, than there is hard work ahead.

One might think that simply knowing of something helps you around it, but it’s always easier to keep swimming in the direction of the river even when you know there’s a cliff at the end. I don’t have any good lessons to offer you, I’m still in school. And that’s exactly as frustrating and annoying as it sounds. Maybe the death thing is just being tired of it all, wanting to give in and give up because it’s tiring to the point of exhaustion to keep trying to fight this current. There is no one who can prop me up and make my life entirely different than it is, but there are hands offering help. There is someone with a light in the darkness trying to illustrate the other, more difficult path.

But in the end, there’s just me.

I am broken.

I hope I am not beyond repair.