For me, starting at the beginning often feels like a monumental task – with lots of things, actually. However, usually once I do, I get rolling pretty quickly and the rest falls into place. This has been true throughout my life. Facing a giant task, my response has often been to delay and avoid, subconsciously hoping whatever it is will go away. It never does.
I enjoy the process of therapy. Some call it counseling. To me it’s neither, really but if it were one over the other, it’s something far more therapeutic than anything else. I have never seen a shrink of any sort to be told what to do or to be given exercises to help me cope with a challenge or situation. I have gone, or go to be heard. We all want to be heard. Some of us want to be heard because we feel as if we aren’t. I want to be heard in part because I’m not, yet I also don’t talk to those closest to me. I wonder sometimes if I resent some of the closest people to me for not talking to me while pushing them away all at the same time. Paying someone to talk to me; actually, paying someone to listen to me seems like the fairest and most just exchange. Does this mean I see myself as unworthy or uninteresting? I doubt it. I think it’s more a matter of feeling like what I need to say is too much for those closest to me to hear. Besides, I’ve said most of it before, albeit gradually and in real time.
So I figured I’d start this little section of this little webpage for this little corner of my life. I’ve tried this before and I have stalled under the weight of the subject matter. This is one little corner of my life, but it’s the darkest and heaviest corner. It consumes most of my thoughts and shows up in my dreams nearly every night. This corner of my life has triggers that can ruin a day or send me into a dark place for a while. It never seems to change and only seems manageable when I am talking about it. My hope here is that I will continue ‘talking’ about it and that will somehow bring some peace to this little corner of my life. Not totally trusting my ability to keep up and not surrender to the pain that will resurface as a result of my reflection, I begin this story with three strategies:
1) I am writing five submissions before publishing my first. I want to have some traction under me and some wind at my back before starting to tell a story that could break down. I figure by the time I have five submissions in the bank I will have developed some momentum.
2) I am not telling anyone that this blog/website is even here until the fifth submission is posted. Again, the genesis of this is rooted in not trusting myself to stay the course of what is sure to be a challenging and emotional process.
3) This site is not devoted to this corner of my life. This section of this effort will be one of many. I intend to write about what runs through my head. So much of what I post to Facebook or discuss with friends is about politics. I have written extensively about politics in the past. I love American politics and that certainly won’t change. But I want to focus on the rest of it. So the discussion of this part of my life will only be part of this website. I am hesitantly inviting you into the part of my life I most avoid, but it’s the part of my life that most consumes me, haunts me and makes up who I am. Actually that should read, ‘who I am now’ because this part of my life has changed who I am and who I could have been.
So if you know me at all you know what this ‘part’ or ‘corner’ of my life is. If I were to scan my ‘Facebook friends’ which is a sad exercise – because of the place that social networking has claimed in our lives, not because of the people on that list, I would guess that most of those ‘friends’ know nothing of who I really am. Trust me when I say, there is nothing exciting about starting this chapter. I do so because I feel a need, and have felt a need for a long time that this story has to be told. I feel like I’m hiding. I feel that because I am. I feel like I am avoiding. Again, I am. I feel like I am allowing only a version of myself to be known. I am. I feel eaten up and beaten down as a result.
This will be my attempt to survive this part of my life so that this corner doesn’t collapse and crush me underneath. I owe it to many people to attempt to drag myself up, including myself. This site is called, ‘so cynical’ because that is how many people view me. And, I am cynical. No question about it. Part of my cynicism is rooted in a quest to be funny or ironic. The rest of it is the real me, part who I am by nature and part the version of me I’ve rusted into.
Thanks for joining me for this new phase of therapy.
