27 July 2009 @1915

27 July 2009 1915

This new medication doesn't yet seem to be affecting me adversely. My moods are still consistent, even slightly elevated, if at least in the mornings right after taking it. I have detected a few of the more mild side effects, like dry mouth, and, well, a somewhat more active bladder. I've actually lost 4 pounds already. I won't burst into a happy dance yet. I still need to know if it's just a fluke or one of those annoying fluctuations.

Last night I slept without the wedge. Wow. I had almost forgotten how good my bed felt when I slept on it the way IKEA intended. My back still hurts, but that's something a couple of trips to the chiropractor, and a whole lot less stress about uncertainty, my job, my relationships, and just about everything that crosses my mind, will remedy. My body can be as stubborn as I am at times. It just doesn't want to let go so I stay sore long after an adjustment. In the same way I've still found ways to make myself miserable emotionally even though I'm quite happily married and am in a better financial situation than ever before.

I do have a tendency to share. I know I've made life difficult for my wife and, at times, my little guy, but somehow they still love me and think highly of me. They're crazy, that's it.

And I'm dead. At least that's what I had started to think at one point. I don't deserve their love and affection, but they just keep dishing it out to me as if I did. I figured that I had died and gone to heaven, or something, and was experiencing the love of God, manifest before my eyes. Well, I had part of that right.

I spent so many years intensely believing that good things can and do happen, that you can be happy and fulfilled in this life, I even spread that word as if it were my mission on Earth, but when it started to actually happen to me I felt grossly inadequate and unprepared, even frightened, but most of all undeserving.

I was raised to believe that no matter what I did, how I lived my life, how many good works I performed, how giving and kind I might be, I would never actually deserve God's love. I was born a filthy sinner, it was only by grace and mercy that I was not damned and condemned to burn for all eternity, and if I so much as thought a contrary thought I could be assured that some day I would be weeping and gnashing my teeth, tormented in the flames of hell, crying, “Eloi! Eloi! Lama sabachthani?”

I always believed that I was destined for hell. By the time I was a teen I was completely convinced, to the point that when I prayed I would beg God to save and preserve others so that they would not have to suffer a fate like mine. After all, Jesus had died on the cross to save them, making them innocent in the eyes of God, but his sacrifice did not apply to me.

How could I, God's reject, expect anything good to happen in my life?

Naturally I was driven by my belief, and wandered through life knowing that I would fail at anything I tried. I'm not sure if I stopped caring at some point, or if I was so lost in my delusion of condemnation that I could no longer relate to reality, but by the time I left home I had lost all sense of logic and reason and began the long slow process of punishing myself to death. It was God's perfect will after all. I stopped going to class in college, I left after only one year and moved in with my grandparents where I sat on the couch and ate chicken nuggets and cottage cheese, I married a total stranger, I didn't bother trying to find enough work to keep us from ending up homeless, I lived on an income of nothing but food stamps for nearly four years in public housing, I barely bathed, I hardly ever shaved, and before I finally got the intestinal fortitude to do what it took to get me out of there my hair was 30 inches long.

It took me writing on my own proverbial wall, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN, to force myself back into reality. I do use the word, back, loosely, since I doubt very much that before that time I had ever truly experienced anything real.

I turned my life around.

That story is for another chapter, but the point is that even though I managed to climb out of the darkest pits of my own living abyss, my sense of irrevocable culpability and unworthiness remained. Even when the quality of my life became undeniably exceptional, I was still unable to appreciate any of the good things that were coming my way.

I married the woman of my dreams, I have a son whom I love with all of my heart, I have the guitar, amp, and rig I have been wanting for decades, I have a good job that pays well, and a nice new car, but somehow I still feel undeserving, grateful, yes, but very, very guilty.

Isn't there a statute of limitations on guilt?

I have to choose to add true contentment to my gratitude. I'm not sure I know how to be happy, but I absolutely must try, for my sake and for my family's. I also have to choose to believe that I'm capable of success. That's a tough one. I have to disbelieve in that old hand-me-down destiny of mine.

That reminds me of that pitifully horrible science fiction movie, The Sphere, in which the main characters defeated the horrible entity by choosing to forget it. I think I'd have to bang my head into a concrete cinder-block for about six to eight months to forget anything so monumental as a giant alien sphere of unimaginable horror.

But I guess I can choose to see it for what it is: a fly-ridden pile of feces. I venture to say that I would be slightly off of my rocker to place my faith in a turd, though stranger things do happen. “...I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung...”

Do I deserve that perfect life? Do my wife and son? Of course they do! So what makes me so special that I can't be happy and enjoy my time with them?

You never really know how dumb you can look until someone takes a snapshot of you at the right time. I guess this is my snapshot of myself, my digital soul search. I can look at what's been going on in my thick skull and begin to train myself away from those idiotic thought and behavioral patterns. Maybe before I check out of here I might learn to stop punishing myself for having been born and actually start to enjoy some of the finer things in life, like my wife, for example.

I can be tactless when I so desire.

My son needs to grow up without the shadow of guilt, the oppression of man-made beliefs, the expectation of failure. He needs his father to set that example for him.

Hey, wait, that's me!