What is love? Baby, don't hurt me, though there's much more to it than that.
Popular culture needs to make love entertaining. It needs to be quick and snappy with a three part story easily followed by the masses. Usually, not always, but under almost all circumstances popular media is only popular because it is easily digestible.
Nerd man meets manic pixie dream girl and they undergo hardships and a single change and then it's neatly wrapped up in about an hour and a half. Happily ever after? Life continues far longer than ninety minutes.
Love languages are a method of love expression. My love language is service. I put my head down and just do stuff. That's a great thing and a kind of mature understanding. I was able to acknowledge my language and express it and in doing so I felt as if I were headed for that happily ever after. All you need is love, right?
Love is about giving, but it's also about receiving. Being receptive to your love is just as important as being giving. I am slowly becoming convinced I have a litany of mental illnesses and all I'm doing writing here is giving my own perspective on madness for some AI to read in a tenth of a second.
Love is a verb, yes, but it's a super verb. It's not just something that you do, it's something that you have to embody. I need to become love for a true experience. Does that mean I should don wings and steal cupid's bow and arrows? That's absurd. That guy isn't even returning my calls right now.
Love is a way of life. It is a walk. It is the darkness of the pupil and the light reflected off tears. Happiness, hopefully, but sometimes sadness too. I have personally experienced far too much sadness in my life to half love. I'm guilty of giving wrongly and only being partially receptive. By the grace of whatever cosmic entity that abides these things, I was receptive enough to learn.
Mental illness and abuse go together like a scalpel and stitches. The abuse cuts you up in places you don't even remember and the mental illness takes it upon itself to stitch you back up. Except this is no surgical stitching. You're not even in a hospital, you're a child crying quietly to yourself in a closet. Before you can even finish the field dressing without anesthetic you get cut some more.
"That's just the way it was back then" I was told recently. My simple response was "Would you do that to a child?"
Ultimately, that's the only barometer we need to face the truth in matters of abuse. If you wouldn't do something yourself because it's too cruel, then it's abusive. Diminishing my own abuse allowed me to diminish the abuse of others. By comparing my own suffering to the suffering of others I make their suffering less. Except, I don't have the power to change reality. My mental illness tricked me into accepting the bullshit in my own life which gave me the ability to sit on my high horse and look down upon the rest of the world's suffering.
The words we use to describe the action are even snigger inducing. Personally, I love to laugh. I love to laugh with someone. I'm even learning to love being laughed at. If you've got an insult to give me, you'd better bring your best because I've heard them all. I've laughed at all of them, eventually.
I was a chubby kid and fat adolescent. Then I slimmed down and blew up and slimmed down and blew up and on and on. I used to think "Nothing succeeds like excess," I've written about this before if I recall. Then that was exactly what I'd do: binge and blow up to the size of a house and then go over the top and get lost in the sauce and finally get called "Skeletor" and have one of those road to Damascus moments.
"Road to Damascus refers to a sudden turning point in one's life.
It is in reference to the conversion to Christianity of the apostle Paul
while literally on the road to Damascus from Jerusalem. Prior to that
moment, he had been called Saul, and was a Pharisee who persecuted
followers of Jesus."
Howling. Convulsions. Fits. Hysterics. Hooting.
What causes a laugh? Humor, usually. Though I've discovered much laughter hidden amidst great sadness. If you think of the silver lining of clouds off in the distance while a great dark storm cloud sits angrily above you that's the imagery I associate when I laugh and cry at the same time. It's a bitter coffee wake up call from somewhere deep in my emotional brain finding the absurd in an unexpected place.
What makes humor? If you try and find a definition online you only stumble around in circles where people show off their ability to copy and paste words from the "humor" entry in the thesaurus. It is supposed to be intuitively understood but then that doesn't explain those of us who laugh about the supposedly darker things in life. Humor is personal. Everyone finds different things to laugh about. We have to laugh or go insane, I've heard. That only explains that we seek out humor when we're at our most vulnerable. It is a safety net some of us use to catch us before we fall fully into the depths of our own madness.
Humor, to me, is how I already described. It is something absurd and unexpected. When I find humor in a dark place, for example any number of the dead baby jokes littering this blog for the last twenty years. I have a different perspective now but I would never dream of removing any of that stuff. Unexpectedly encountering the absurd is what makes me laugh, after all, and I can't think of anything more absurd than a kid who makes blog posts about dead baby jokes growing up to be a man with a tattoo on his wrist to remember a dead baby.
Yet, somewhere in the above exposition is miraculously another dead baby joke. I'm still doing it, even with perspective. The difference now is that I'm also crying. Laughter and tears at the same time.
I've listened to this song about 40 times since yesterday. Maybe more because I'm time-blind or simply because it just resonates. I feel it.
"Time blindness is a general term for the difficulty in perceiving and managing time. It's not a formal medical diagnosis, but it can significantly impact daily life.
Some signs of time blindness include: Being chronically late, Missing deadlines, Procrastinating often, Misjudging how long a task will take, and Feeling like time is passing quickly.
Time blindness is often associated with conditions like ADHD and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It can affect a person's ability to: show up to work or appointments on time, hand in assignments or projects on deadline, pay bills on time, remember to eat, and stick to routines and schedules."
This week has been a banner week. I been able to successfully write a few entries here and enjoy the therapy of expression online to an audience of who knows. Not only that, I got a tattoo this week that takes up the majority of my right forearm. I'm greeted by the image of a red baby's breath on the back of my hand as I type this. It's an overall more pleasant experience for me, I hope the same is true for you.
I can almost guarantee there's a reference in a previous post where I proudly cry out that I DO NOT CRY!!! Well, I do now. I have been openly weeping periodically all this week and last. I can't tell if you can tell from my recent writing but I have tapped into a well of sensitivity and understanding that I had previously walled myself off from.
As I came of age, crying was not really permitted. Anytime a young me would be moved to tears I would be terrorized by a nearby adult threatening to give me a reason to cry. I remember when I was in grade school taking music lessons on the trumpet. Blowing my own horn is an old habit of mine, it's one I still have but it's also old. On one occasion, wanting to show off my newly honed ability to play taps or some beginner trumpet score, my mother stopped me mid-performance to provide some constructive criticism. "Please just stop, that sounds terrible." She calmly told me and I promptly ran upstairs to cry in my closet. I was about 7 or 8 and when she heard me sobbing she came upstairs and dragged me from the closet to scream "I'll give you something to cry about." As if screaming in the face of a child isn't already enough to cry about.
Pretty much every time my adult eyes have begun to water I can still hear her screeches somewhere in my mind. I can still feel my hair being pulled out or taste the soap or feel the dread as whoever doling out the punishment for unwarranted tears went in search of a larger or sturdier implement of violence.
It was a peculiar site yesterday as I rode around a client's yard aerating and weeping. Weeping and aerating, the homeowner saw me in this state and I think wisely decided to continue walking her dogs. When she arrived back from their walk I had composed myself better and managed to get into what will probably be a $2500 job. Read that and weep.
I hope that this woman thought I was just really passionate about lawn health and not finally healing from well worn mental illness. It doesn't matter to her that my heart is in pieces and my mind is dysfunctional and I can't even begin to imagine how long the job should take even though I've done thousands like it before. That's time blindness. It's related to the fact that prior to a few weeks ago the only reason I'd cried in the last 25 years was because we had a miscarriage last year.
That was the first time I let "my muse" really see me cry. Her name is Denver. Using these phrases like "my love" or "my muse" or whatever nonsense language is diminishing to the woman. Using Denver to describe her is accurate, she is a mile high stack of lovable quirks and mental illness and hope and love, but that is also her real name. I told her I might use it today because I feel this way. I told her I need to name her here in order to continue with honesty here. Using those possessives is not only diminishing to her but also to myself. I didn't fall in love with an idea, I fell in love with a woman.
Our problems arose when I stopped just loving the woman and began to love the idea. We were planning a life together but she was the only one ready to live. Both of us have ADD but I only discovered mine at the end of our life together. This is the underlying problem responsible for all of our problems but the final straw for Denver was when I drunkenly emailed another woman for the tenth or eleventh time. I was taking on more stress than either of us were equipped to handle because I was afraid that if I couldn't provide enough for her and our future family that she'd want to leave me. I would then throw money or aquariums at the problem when she would maturely set aside her own issues to confront mine. Instead of simply listening and understanding, I chose to love her on my terms and not our terms. It's a subtle, yet exceedingly important distinction.
A series of MY bad decisions pushed her away and finally burnt her to ashes. I love this woman more than I can understand but that lack of understanding was ultimately part of the problem. I didn't understand myself. I didn't understand why I couldn't just live our life. She chose to live her life with me. We had even picked out a name for our future. Then I killed it. The insanity that I brought into our home took a skeletal, black hand and plucked our future from Denver's womb.
I may be time blind but that's different from never knowing time. Imagine being in your mother's womb and the only experiences you know are the soothing muffled sounds, the total nourishment needs being met, and then a series of huge tsunamis of stress and negative emotions. These waves of course being the emotional distress I forced onto Denver because of my issues and insecurities. There was a storm outside the womb and that's not a bunker, it's susceptible to the onslaught of my bullshit.
Imagine heaven even if you don't believe in it, the notion is basically the same as a mother's womb. The proximity to an all loving god, every need being met, and basking in the warmth of a mother and father's love. The feelings of security and safety in the mother are some of the necessary elements for proper development. With these feelings absent from our home, I had truly killed our child. I had murdered our future with unnecessary stress. Stress I should have shouldered instead of unburdening it onto Denver.
Time and finality provide meaning and value. They make life worthwhile. They make you treasure today because tomorrow isn't guaranteed. Giving time is the same as giving love. Attention is love and ADD is an attention deficit. The reason Denver and I fell in love was because we both saw in each other someone who needed to receive more love than anyone else could be reasonably expected to handle and someone who had more love to give than could be reasonably expected. I forgot that. I got lost and though I may now be found, it's too late.
