In The Beginning

OK...so here's what I'm gonna do...I'm going to use this blog (at least in part) as a guide on the journey of finding and nurturing myself back to good health.  I've been giving this a lot of thought and, from my own personal experience, I have found that the most difficult hurdles were (and still are) the psychological ones.  I have also found that, personally, there is no way of  'getting around' those hurdles and trust me...  I've tried. They are literally walls that you HAVE to go through to get physically better.  But you don't have to take my word for it.  If you struggle with these things, as well, all you have to do is answer these questions:

a) How long have I been in physical pain?
b) How long have I been in emotional pain?

If your answers were longer than 6 months, then you either have chronic emotional, chronic physical pain, or both.

c) Has your chronic emotional and/or physical pain severely reduced the quality of your life?

If you answered no, then you can stop reading right now...

d) Do you suspect that you have a disease that is so rare that it has yet to be discovered by modern medicine?

If you answered yes, then you can stop reading right now and you should call 911...quick...

So, for our purposes, let's just go ahead and assume that you have stated that, yes, you have had chronic emotional and/or physical pain for more than six months to the point that your quality of life is severely affected.  Additionally, the 'things that ail ya' are not a complete medical mystery, so there is, more than likely,  valuable information out there that can help you heal yourself and not be in pain anymore.

And here are two sayings that deeply reflect why it is absolutely necessary to discover, and then deal with, whatever psychological hurdles you may have buried in the dark corners of your mind that are keeping you from fully nurturing yourself back to health...

"Your best intentions have gotten you exactly where you are, right now."

"The definition of 'crazy' is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting different results."

Now...go ahead and get indignant for a minute...I'll wait...

OK then...

See...here's the thing...no matter how it's broken down, the previous approaches to handling pain and, ultimately, self care, haven't worked. The pain and ill health have become chronic.

Usually, when things become 'chronic', it's because the body isn't functioning well on many different levels. And no one, but you, can break it all down and figure out where things have come unglued.  It's pointless to feel any shame or blame as you do this, btw...chances are you have done what most Western people do...

When they get sick, they go to doctor...after doctor...after doctor...

When they get fat, they try diet...after diet...after diet...

And I can't say how much helpful information you gathered, over the years...maybe a little, maybe a lot.  But what I do know is that, if you haven't worked through some of the psychological barriers that keep you from fully nurturing yourself, it's not going to matter how good the medical advice is, or how good the drugs work, or how many steps you managed to work through in a program...unless you remove those barriers, ain't nothing gonna be able to fix ya.

And you might say to yourself "...but it's not FAIR!!!  It's not FAIR that I'm sick and fat and that person over there, sucking down a Big Gulp and three hot dogs looks JUST FINE!  It's not FAIR cause I mostly eat right, I usually get enough sleep, that I took the steps instead of the elevator and I TAKE MY VITAMINS!!!  It's not FAIR! I don't drink or do drugs nearly as much as I USED to!!  I've given up X and Y.  Do I have to give up Z, too?  Well...are you still sick?  Are you still fat? If you are, then, yes, you do.  You have to give up Z, too."

And what is 'fair'?

It depends upon what you mean... If you mean 'fair' as in 'do you deserve to be sick and fat and in pain?' No, most likely not. No one deserves to suffer.

If you mean 'fair' as in 'why should I have to deal with all of this and that other person doesn't?'  Well...statistically speaking, someone's gotta, so it's just as fair that you are that someone as it would be if they were that someone.  Can you say you DON'T deserve to be in your predicament more than that other person does?

But if you mean 'fair' as in 'balanced'...as in a relatively predictable outcome that your body would break, at some point, considering all of the negative things it has absorbed over the years from external and internal events...I don't know...that's for you to decide.  Personally I believe that, all things considered, my health situation is exceedingly 'fair'.  I have been an historically poor caretaker of my physical self over my life.  I don't like it.  But it's the truth.  Despite my best intentions, I have made some very bad decisions.  Repeatedly.  And sometimes I still do.

And 'nurturing' is really what it all comes down to...the ability to nurture one's self.  There are a million reasons why people can't or won't nurture themselves the way they should.  Usually it's from feelings that they somehow don't deserve to care about themselves that much. They feel as though they are being blatantly 'self-absorbed'  when they insist on taking all of the necessary time and doing the necessary work that's required to care for themselves every day.  When your personality is made up this way, then you'll neglect the Universal truth about loving yourself while simultaneously demanding a million different, random things you believe you need (from yourself, and others).

You'll feel entitled to have a whole bunch of 'this' and a whole lot of 'that'...you'll feel you deserve things (like booze or chocolate cake) because of the 'sacrifices' that you make or that you feel 'life makes you make'.  It's hard to think with a clear head when you are starving from neglect.

 And you will continue to make faulty decisions for yourself because you haven't really gotten the point -  every time you choose to do something or be a part of something, or be involved with someone that is, in some way, destructive or draining to you, you are actively choosing not to nurture yourself and you are letting that decision be OK.  And it's not.



It's like William Burroughs once said "There are no honorable bargains involving exchange of qualitative merchandise, like souls, for quantitative merchandise, like time and money."

How To Be A Good King/Queen When You Are The Ruler of Crazyland

Back in the Olden Days, children were left tangible legacies from their parents.  Sons often received things like titles and gold and a cool castle (literally...what with no heat and all) and daughters were given dowries that could be traded for a husband...things like goats and a spinning wheel and a book on the Karma Sutra (which, unfortunately, most of them couldn't read since they were girls and may explain a lot about why gay sex really took an upswing about this time since all the boys could read, but, you know, printing was really expensive, so they probably had to share like one book between a whole group of them.  The Olden Days were confusing times.)

But, today, children are left with dubious legacies. Therapists often call these legacies 'emotional baggage' and they want you to throw it away quick and get rid of it.  But it's not that easy.  Cause a) it kinda sticks to you and b) it's hard to throw away stuff your folks gave you, even if you don't really want it.  I still have my dad's dentures somewhere around here.  God knows why.

So...now you're grown.  And you've gotten your legacy.  And now you're The King.  Or Queen of Crazyland.  What cha gonna do?  It's not like you can drop a bomb on the whole country and try to get political asylum in France.  Well, you could, but honestly...France?  Even Crazyland is better than a bunch of whiny French...

You can't give the crown to anyone else. Well, again, you could, but I'm not so sure that's a good idea either.  Letting someone else run your country never works out very well.  You usually end up out in the field with the rest of the peasants, digging up potatoes in holey socks, while someone else sits around in your (albeit cold as fuck) castle throwing orders around. 

Now The King is your thinking brain, ok?  And the peasants that make up Crazyland, they are your emotions.  I like metaphors.  They are visual and fun, just in case I ever want to turn all of this into a book for emotionally damaged children.

The King's job is to take care of and protect all of the inhabitants of the land, despite the fact that many of them are bat-shit crazy and wouldn't know the truth of a situation if it ran over them with a bright yellow Hummer and planted a big Crazyland flag on a spike through their emotional little hearts. The King is wise and kind.  He loves the villagers, even when they do dumb things, like cover themselves in lamb's blood and run, naked through the woods looking for hibernating bears and one-night-stands to curl up next to.  He knows that they don't know any better and he so he puts things in place to keep as many disasters from happening, as possible.  Like implants that give them an electric shock if they wander more than 20 feet into the forest.  Stuff like that.  Or maybe some bells on a string...I don't know...it's your fucking kingdom...

Why Does Love Always Look Like A Scene From Dexter

Babies learn what they are taught.  Sometimes it's good.  Sometimes, not.  This is why some puppies can learn to sit when they are only a few weeks old, and others are content with just laying around, eating their own poop.  Most of us don't have to see a therapist to figure out which puppy we were. We know. Between the stench of decades-long disappointments and the inescapable feeling that, in relationships, we are what we eat...we know. Now here's the thing...no one likes it when they are the poop-eating puppy, but once you realize that's what you were taught, it's much easier to not feel so badly about it. You can stop the bullshit and start learning how to act like a functional human being.

It's much worse to pretend that you aren't a poop-eating puppy (if you are) and, instead, continuing to pretend that you are a puppy who knows how to sit (if you aren't). Cause then you just bumble around, throwing yourself into situations that require you to sit, but, because you refused to recognize this deficit, you just end up lolling about and trying to look impressive, while you clumsily try to fob off your ability to take in shit, as a social skill.

...which never works. And you end up alone...again. Licking it off...again. Which then makes you one pissed off, lonely fucker who is sick of eating shit...again.

When a person doesn't understand how something works, it makes them feel confused.  And when most people (especially men) feel confused about something, especially something emotional, it makes them a little pissed off.  I don't know why.  But here is the thing...learning about 'love' is just like learning about anything else...fixing a car, learning to read, whatever...it's a skill.  It isn't magic, or just for the lucky, or just for the rich.  If you are the poop-eating puppy then, at the very least, just start doing the opposite.  Of everything.  You may not learn how to sit, but at least you won't be eating any more shit, and that's a start.

But this time is going to be different.  Why?  Because I say so...

And I am thin.  And rich.  And well-balanced.  A girl can dream, can't she?  Wishing something to be a certain way, doesn't make it so unless you are Dorothy and you own some fancy red shoes.  But that's OK.  I don't have to know Taekwondo to stop a burglar from breaking into my home, if I have have a home security system...or a gun...or both...

First you have to do some 'risk assessment'.  When navigating the streets of love, would you say you are as capable as 'a choir boy in downtown LA at midnight' or closer to 'Clint Eastwood on Main St. at high noon'? You may want to be Clint Eastwood (or do Clint Eastwood, I mean, who wouldn't), but if the reality about who you are when it comes to your ability to properly navigate down Love St. is actually closer to someone who could easily be Opie's 'best bud'...well, you might need to prepare your defenses in advance. 

Now don't confuse 'defenses' with 'defensiveness'...there's a difference.  One is 'appropriate boundaries', the other is 'a knee-jerk reaction to being scared that is meant to give you some space but usually just ends up making you look like an asshole'.

The Emotions of Emotion

Sometimes I wish I lived in England.  I like that people on the BBC don't get emotional.  Pretty much everything they talk about, whether it's a world disaster or a review of the next Harry Potter movie...it all sounds like a bedtime story being read by Mary Poppins.  I don't know if it's because I have 10 times too much testosterone in my system or if it's because emotional stuff just freaks me out...but all of the yackity yack about feelings and such just makes me want to throw up a little in my mouth most of the time. Maybe this is why most other women don't like me very much.  Maybe this is why I like gay men...it's just the right amount of brawn and barbie.  I don't know.  But when it comes to dealing with emotions, I like to take a very factual approach to the whole thing.  Sure, therapy is great, but after a certain point, I just want the formatted 'to-do' list on how to solve my problem...preferably no longer than a page cause I'm not long on patience either.

In A Minute There Is Time

In the Bar Room Brawl of Life, Crazy Always Wins

Yes, Crazy will always beat the living shit out of Smarts...and the smarter you are, the more unwilling you will be to accept this fact because your ego will insist that you hold onto the erroneous belief that you're smart enough to somehow out-think Crazy.  But you can't.  Why? Because Smarts has Logic for a trainer.  And Smarts believes that all you need to 'win' is  rapier-like wit, a sharp tongue and some cutting intellect.

Unfortunately, Smarts seems to always forget that you don't bring a knife to a gunfight...

See, Crazy will use whatever it can get it's grubby little claws on, to win...it doesn't matter if it's throwing your deepest, darkest secrets into your face, or shredding you to pieces with the things you fear most, or shooting you in the guts with every threat and manipulative lie Crazy can come up with...Crazy has no boundaries, no 'safety word', and no shame for lobbing verbal abuse like Molotov cocktails.  Crazy could turn your love of kittens into a Walter PPK and figure out a way to use it against you, given the chance.

And Smarts blindly walks into this minefield of WTF as though it were some kind of resolvable or winnable 'challenge'...

Mistake #1 - Thinking Crazy won't commit to a suicide bombing.

Crazy doesn't give a shit about resolutions. 'Resolving' with you would mean you 'win' in Crazy's mind. And Crazy just can't have that.  Crazy doesn't subscribe to the whole win/lose concept.  Crazy ONLY cares about one thing...that YOU don't win.  And if that means that, in the end, nobody wins and that you are both decimated, beyond all recognition, into piles of bloody pulp, well that's just fine with Crazy...cause Crazy doesn't play 'Chicken'...Crazy won't veer...Crazy will just hit the gas and the last thing you'll remember before your life explodes are those creepy eyes staring through that dirty windshield...gunning for ya'.

"And you think you're a guest, you're a tourist, at best..."  That's a line from a song by Elvis Costello called My Dark Life.  It's also plastered on the entrance sign to Crazyland.  It should have also read "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter."  But hey, where's the fun in that? That would probably be way too direct for Crazy...

Mistake #2 - Thinking that you can ever truly navigate or comfortably hang out in Crazyland, much less change the politics.

Cause where Crazy lives, the streets are always shifting, and the stairways go nowhere, and there are invisible sinkholes and tarpits and quicksand and random flames shooting up from the ground and air filled with methane gas created by all of Crazy's bullshit chaos.  There's are very few street signs and the ones that ARE there are inaccurate as fuck, half the shops are boarded up, the other half keep unpredictable hours, like from 1:04pm - 3:17pm every other Wednesday and sometimes Sunday in the months that have 31 days.  And there's no one to complain to or reason with about all of this because the folks in charge of Crazy's Crazyland have names like Irrationally Irate and Delusionally Paranoid and Pathologically Neurotic and Lacking in Empathy and Pathetically Victimized and Morbidly Jealous and Narcissistically Fragile.  And they spend their time swapping out street signs and doing whatever else they can think of to ensure that you will remain perpetually lost in their domain.   You may falsely believe, at first, that you can somehow enrich, and even potentially, extricate Crazy...

Mistake #3 - Believing that Crazy has any interest, at all, in ever leaving Crazyland.

 Crazy is exactly where Crazy wants to be...and so what if that means that most days are spent sitting around on a throne made out of the shrunken heads of all of those well-meaning patsies that came before you, armed with THEIR good intentions and sparkling brilliance as Crazy screams out absurd directives, pointless quests and endless demands on how other's can accommodate them.  So what if they continuously shore up that  tired old song and dance with imperatives about how they weren't LOVED enough when they were a much younger and more innocent batshit Crazy.  Crazy don't care.  Cause in Crazyland, your time belongs to them. And they will suck up every iota your time with nonsensical requests for validation.  Requests that, at first,  may appeal to the brilliant and do-goodery, ego-driven 'teacher' inside of you.

Mistake #4 - Believing that you're the one who can finally show Crazy 'The Way'.

Stop it.  You can't.  It's like trying to punch a squid...Crazy just absorbs it all and then forms a deadly, gelatinous mound over your psyche, where it will suck and suck and suck until you are a shriveled, apple-core of a head rolling around on the floor, your spirit in ashes, your soul black because Crazy has ravenously drained every bit of life force from it that can be smashed out.

Run Motherfucker Run...

The Big One

What's the biggest lie of all?  It's the enormous lie, made up of dozens of tiny lies, that help me justify the distance between the 'me I wanna be' and the 'me I actually am'.  Now I know that almost everyone has an idealized version of themselves rattling around in their head, somewhere.  And that's all fine and well.  But when you live each day pretending that Ideal You is actually Real You...and when, in reality, Ideal You and Real You have about as much resemblance to each other as the Eiffel Tower and a box of rocks...well, then...there's a problem...

And there's also a solution...or three...

You can go ahead and keep pretending and, if you can pull it off, that's great.  But unless you surround yourself with a gaggle of blind ass-kissers, eventually those around you are just not gonna be able to help but point out, in some form or fashion, that your grip on your 'personal' reality' is both slippery and disturbing.  People just can't trust your opinions or take you seriously when you live in total denial.  I mean, if you keep insisting that this is gonna be your best 'Year of the Bikini' yet, despite the fact that your ass is bigger than a house, well, how can you be trusted to make astute observations about THEIR lives.  At best, you'll become that person whose opinions are most valued by your friends because they know that, if they do the exact opposite of everything you suggest, well then things will be just fine.  At least they've managed to turn your anti-perception into some sort of tool.  Unfortunately for you, you just get to BE the tool.

Another solution is changing your Ideal Self into something that more closely resembles a box of rocks...I mean your Real Self.  As Quintin Crisp once said, "Don't try and keep up with the Jones.  Bring them down to your level.  It's cheaper."  This is the best solution for those people who have just flat given up.  It can be a pretty short trip from "I'm getting older.  My tits are sagging" to "Fuck it.  Hand me that Southern Comfort and a box of Crispy Creams."  So for those of you who find this to be the best alternative....have at it.  Put those fat little feet up, tape old newspaper on all of the windows in your house and get resigned to having to eventually wash yourself with a rag on a stick.  You think it won't happen, but it will...I don't even remember the last time I was able to 'trim up' without my vajayjay looking like it has lost a fight with a one-eyed buzz saw.

And finally, there's the 'Pimp My Box o' Rocks' solution...turning that fierce mess of unrecognizable Real Self into something that looks more like the Eiffel Tower...or the Venus de Milo...or a much shinier box of rocks that's at least got a bit of spackling to hold it all together...you know, just do your best.

So I'm opting for Box Number Three.  At least until I get so exhausted and over it I give up and switch it out for a rag on a stick.

I'm taking my Big Lie and breaking it down into the three smaller lies of smoking, fat, and sitting on my ass.  And, of those three lies, I'm starting with fat.  I joined Weight Watchers Online about 7 weeks ago.  So far I've lost 13 pounds.  I don't know how it's gonna turn out this week though.  Yesterday I managed to top off my 'normal' meals with a pint of Key Lime Pie Ice Cream, washed down with a bottle of red wine.  When I entered that into my Weight Watchers Points Tracker, online, flames burst out of my computer and my scale put all of it's possessions into a bandanna, tied it to a stick and ran, screaming towards the railroad tracks...

Fuck that scale.  I didn't like it anyway.