Some people have well-organized minds, with thoughts, ideas, and memories neatly organized like files in an office file cabinet. They can recall names, dates, entire conversations, as though they went into their mental repository and drew the file easily from the alphabetized compilation of papers. That's not me at all. My mind isn't neatly organized, or really organized at all. My thoughts, ideas, and memories are scattered about in random piles across the office floor. When I'm lost in thought, or daydreaming, or thinking about a particular subject or issue, I often stumble across a thought that appears completely random. My friends have said many times that I will mention something that seems to have come completely out of left field. But that's just my subconscious rummaging through the random, unorganized piles of papers that make up my Thoughts, Ideas, and Memories (which from here on I will refer to as "T.I.M.s" or, more easily, "Tims").
The randomness of the arising of a Tim in my mind oftentimes leads to equally random - not to mention unexpected - feelings, emotions, and attitudes arising as well. This is natural, given that certain Tims evoke corresponding emotional reactions. When I think of my dad, or my children, or either of my ex-wives, specific feelings emerge and grow, depending on the Tim in question. I've always had a difficult time processing my emotions, and perhaps my unorganized, random file-opening mind is a big reason why. The only method I have of dealing with my feelings is to not deal with them: bottle them up and seal the lid, keeping everything tucked away inside tightly. The only problem with that is that any bottle - even metaphoric bottles - can only hold so much before they overflow or break or the cap flies off from the pressure of the contents within. When I reach that point, I become a different person. Or maybe I become who I really am, without the restraints of my emotional bottling locking the real me away. Jury is still out on that one.
I fear that I am reaching that point. To be honest, it's only really ever happened one other time. I'll get into that later on. For now I'll say that it was one of the worst moments in my life. I really don't want to sound histrionic or melodramatic here, and I am working diligently to avoid employing hyperbole in my writing. I want my words to be plain, accurate and meaningful. This is the most difficult article I have ever had to write, which is indicative that this is also the most important article I have ever had to write - for my own well-being, at least.
"You're a monster." Ah, yes, here's a Tim that tends to pop up more frequently than most others. These are the words of ex-wife #1, whom I shall refer to from here on as Kali. She called me a monster, not out of anger or maliciousness, but because she truly believed it. Her subsequent actions demonstrated the earnestness of that belief. Truth is, I have had a hard time not believing it myself. Not a day goes by that I don't wonder whether Kali was right. Maybe I am a monster. We can be so egocentric that we always think we're one of the good guys. But maybe I'm the bad guy in this story.
Perhaps one of the worst aspects of love - romantic love in particular, or "eros" in Greek - is that we tend to base our value as individuals on the status of our love life. The "forever alone" Internet meme comes to mind here. I'm not sure why we carry this idea from junior high over into adulthood, but whatever the reason may be, it affects us. No one wants to be rejected, or to feel unwanted, and no one especially wants to feel unloved. It makes sense to an extent why our (Facebook official) relationship status plays such a huge factor in our perceptions of ourselves.
As amazing as the experience of both emotional and physical intimacy can be, the converse experience damages to an equal degree, if not more. I've been married twice, and both ended in divorce. Kali and I were married for eight years, the last of which was spent separated. We have three children. I can make a long list of reasons why our marriage fell apart, but most of those reasons find their roots in the fact that I was unfulfilled. I didn't feel loved. I knew Kali was dedicated to the marriage, but being dedicated to the legal arrangement isn't the same as being committed to the other person in said arrangement. Was I wrong to feel unfulfilled? Was I wrong to feel unloved? Opinions vary, to be certain. What is, in my estimation, inarguable, is the fact that those feelings contributed directly to my feeling worthless and unlovable.
Kali spent most of our marriage trying to change me. She wanted me to wear certain clothes, read certain books, and behave in a certain way. She wanted me to become someone else rather than accept me for who I am. I spent much of my marriage resisting her. We were, on the outside, the "perfect Christian couple." I was a minister, she was the good house wife. On the inside, she expressed disappointment with me, and I harbored resentment towards her. I felt unloved because all I felt was her desire to control me and change me.
I wanted to leave her. Actually, I wanted to just leave. I wanted to run far away, where no one knows me: someplace where I could find safety in anonymity, where no one had any expectations of me, and no one would be disappointed by who I am because no one would know who I am. I wanted to flee, but I stayed because of our children. I could never leave them. They are the only real good I've ever contributed to the world.
I tried to make it work. I tried to ignore my feelings for the sake of the family we had created. I was able to remain emotionally stable by doing the one thing I know how to do: I bottled up my emotions. Year after year, the bottle filled more and more. The bottle filled more and more quickly with each passing year. The bottle filled not only with the troubled feelings of my marriage, but with financial concerns, questions about my life's purpose and meaning, and my increasing questions and concerns about god and religion. I tried to confide in my wife about the doubts and questions I had about my faith, but she shut down the discussion whenever I would bring it up. She didn't want to deal with it, and my only guess is that she wanted to ignore it in hopes that the problem would just fix itself. Turns out this was Kali's modus operandi when dealing with troubling issues.
As my emotional bottle came closer and closer to maximum capacity, I grew more and more depressed. In 2004, in the months before Kali and I separated, I went from 215 lbs. to 170 lbs. I was so depressed that I couldn't bring myself to eat. The more depressed I got, the more Kali would distance herself from me. Ignore the problem, and hope it works itself out. When I needed my wife the most, she was nowhere to be found. I started thinking about suicide. She decided to remodel the house to distract herself from her mentally ill husband.
Ah, the house. I hated that fucking house. I never wanted to buy that house. That's not to say I didn't want to be a home owner, but I knew at the time that we couldn't afford a house. But Kali insisted. We were both getting close to 30, and she wanted to "live the dream" of owning our own home. It was a dream, because to make it a reality I had to work four jobs just to pay the mortgage and the rest of the bills. She didn't have a job because, well, I'm not really sure why. Maybe part of the dream was to be a stay-at-home mom. It's not enough to be the perfect Christian couple. We had to be the perfect Christian couple of the 1950s.
I can't place all the blame on Kali, though. I was never really that good of a husband. We got married young, and I was way too immature to be a husband. We had our first child shortly after marrying (yeah, we had that "premarital sex" that preachers warn teenagers about, and didn't put much thought into "safe sex"). Afterwards I spent most of my 20s trying to be a "grown up," even though I felt as though all my peers saw me as below them. I focused most of my energy on trying to become someone important, whether through my work as an online Christian apologist, or as a preacher, or going back to school in hopes of one day maybe trying to follow my real dream of being a professor of philosophy at a university and writing books. Most of the time, Kali was an afterthought.
I was a good father, though. I noticed a couple years ago that I always refer to my fatherhood in the past tense. I am still my children's father, even if now only biologically. It's the only job I've ever had that I have been sad to lose.
Palm Sunday, April 4, 2004: the bottle broke, and its contents spilled out all over. I woke up that morning, feeling equally broken. I couldn't get out of bed. All will to move was gone. I was scheduled to preach that morning at the church where I worked as youth minister at the time (one of my four jobs), but I couldn't get up. I never made it to church that morning. I have no idea what they did in lieu of the sermon I never delivered. I didn't know what to do, but I knew what I could no longer do: I couldn't keep working four jobs. I couldn't keep pretending to be something I wasn't. I couldn't keep my feelings to myself any longer.
I told Kali I couldn't be married to her any more. I sent an email to my Christian friends telling them I couldn't be a Christian any more. Neither made me feel any less depressed. If anything, I felt more depressed, because now I felt both alone and lost. I had no sense of direction, and didn't feel like I had anyone to turn to who would understand or empathize. That's when I met her. I'll call her Vera. She was intelligent, beautiful, funny, and most of all understanding. We started talking, and eventually started hanging out. She became the shoulder I could cry on, the ear that would listen, and the voice of reason amidst the chaos of my life. Over time, one thing led to another and we developed feelings - feelings which we acted upon. Kali and I separated the day she discovered what was going on between me and Vera.
I loved Vera, but I ended our relationship because, as time went on, all I saw in her was my guilt. She was a connection to that part of my past I wanted to forget. She was intrinsically involved with the events that led to the end of my marriage, and I couldn't have a clean slate with her. I hated myself for a long time for letting her go, but it was all I could think to do to maintain my sanity. I didn't realize then how many sleepless nights I'd have thinking about Vera, and what effect that would have on my sanity.
Maybe I've always been the monster, and it took something severe for the monster to finally be revealed. The second blog entry I wrote for Dead-Logic, written a little over three years ago (I started this blog in October, 2009, the month and year I married my now second ex-wife), is titled "Between Gods and Demons," and is an exhortation to be careful not to judge people too quickly, or see people as merely two-dimensional characters. As I wrote back then:
... we should be careful not to rush to conclusions about a person. We may not know all the factors (both internal and external) that led to a person's actions. And we don't always know the reasons or true motives behind a given decision. We have a difficult enough time answering the question "Who am I?" for ourselves. How much more difficult then it is to answer that question for someone else.
I wrote that article for Kali, or at least with Kali in mind. But maybe she's right. She thinks our children are better off with me not in the picture, and has done all she can to make sure that's the way it is. I haven't seen my children in... a while. Part of the reason is that, for a long time, I believed Kali. I saw myself as the monster. Sometimes I still do.
I met my second wife under nearly the same circumstances in which I met Vera. In fact, now that I think about it, she and Vera have a lot of similarities. That's likely why I was smitten with her from the first time I saw her. Here I'll call her Bellatrix. I've written about her before, so I won't go into much detail here. Her part in this story is that, for the time we were together before she left me for someone else, she made me believe that I wasn't the monster after all. She made me feel safe with lowering the walls I put up after Kali and I divorced and Vera and I ended. I felt such a genuine happiness the day we got married (three years ago this month), and I truly felt that this was the beginning of a new life. I truly believed that I had found someone who accepted me for me, who loved me without feeling the need to change me. It was the first time in a long time that I made myself vulnerable to someone else. Bellatrix made me believe I could be happy. She made me believe I deserved to be happy. She made me believe that falling in love and even getting married was worth the risk. Then she left me for a guy she had been seeing behind my back, just months after getting married. I've never believed in karma, but I was damn close to believing in it then.
Anything I write here to describe how I felt would sound hyperbolic, so I'll just skip it. I couldn't accept that it happened. I sure as hell couldn't accept how it happened. I was so confident, and yet we didn't even last one year as a married couple. Whenever my psyche stumbles upon this Tim amidst the piles of papers in my mind, all I feel is resentment. My life shouldn't have gone like this. I shouldn't have to say that I've been divorced twice. When I look back on my life, all I can think is that I hate how it has gone. All I see is a series of one disappointment leading to the next. Maybe my soft spot for Buddhism stems from how applicable the first two Noble Truths are to my experience. 1) Life is full of suffering, disappointment, pain, and lack of satisfaction: they call it dukkha. 2) This dukkha is caused by desire. Man, I hear that. If I had no desires, I would never get disappointed. That is, of course, the third Noble Truth of Buddhism: get rid of desire to get rid of the dukkha.
I've lived out this third premise in rather unhealthy ways. When my dad died, I shut off my emotions. They were still there, just bottled away so tightly that I couldn't bring myself to feel them. I considered it necessary, given that everyone else was (understandably) less than emotionally stable at the time: my mom, my sister, my sister's wuss of a husband (they're divorced now, so it's okay to say that). Someone had to be the rock, so I stepped up. I didn't really mourn my dad's loss until two years later when my best friend Steve died of colon cancer. His death hit me twice as hard because all the emotions I had locked away when dad died gushed out with all the feelings I had for Steve. No wonder I had a religious relapse. I damn near moved back to the Chicagoland area so I could become part of the church Steve founded. I even tried applying to seminary, but, in what I facetiously and ironically refer to as divine intervention, I was pulled over, arrested and taken to jail while on my way to the seminary to drop off my application. It's a long story that involves expired license plates and what not. Fortunately my friend Mike the White bailed me out.
The only way I have been able to cope with not seeing my kids is to shut off my emotions. The danger is that, in my attempt to remain mentally stable, I sometimes forget that I ever was a father. Am a father. There I go, talking in the past tense again. I've cauterized the wounds when there's no other source of treatment.
For most of my life I have learned to use humor to disguise my inability to process emotions competently. If I don't shut off my feelings, I bottle them and then replace them with silliness. All this has done for me really is to make me disgusted with myself. If I'm the clown, everyone laughs. Then they expect me to keep making them laugh. When I'm not in the mood to make people laugh, they wonder what's wrong with me. Maybe nothing's wrong with me. Maybe I just don't feel like putting on the makeup and wig and big red nose right now. Yet another disappointment in my life. Yet another Tim reminding me that I don't like the person I've been showing the world. I feel like an ugly guy who's put on an ugly mask to cover his ugliness, and now he's pissed because he found out the mask is ugly. I've played the clown to hide the monster.
Damn it. That last sentence sounds like I stole it from a soap opera script. Regardless, I'm done with that shit. I made a vow to stop wearing a mask when I gave up on religion. I can't pretend to be what I'm not. People are going to have to either take me or leave me. If you can't accept me, then lo que sea.
Yeah, that's a Tim that stings whenever I come across it. It's a fairly recent Tim, but time isn't a factor here. A close family member condemns me, insults me, and speaks to me in a manner usually reserved for the dregs of society, for no other reason than I have decided to be honest about where I stand vis-à-vis god, faith, and religion. I had heard the stories, but for me, existentially, they were just stories. Now it's a reality. According to the Bible, Jesus explained his purpose for coming to earth:
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn “‘a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law — a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.’ [Matthew 10:34-36, NIV]
Mission accomplished there, Jesus. This is why a lot of atheists are still in the closet. Someone I love dearly spoke to me like, well, like I'm a monster. I don't know what to say. I don't know what I want to say. It's been almost three months now since this person last said anything to me, and with the holidays just around the corner, well, I don't have to explain how awkward things can get.
If I may indulge in a moment that may be interpreted as whining (if you've stayed with me this far, my guess is that you can endure anything else I throw at you), I can't help but wonder why. Why is this my life? Why has my journey (so far) been such a sucking suckfest? Why does everything I get excited about turn out to be a disappointment? Why do I drive a powder blue car that looks like it belongs to a 90 year old woman?
Okay, got that out of my system - at least for now. I've been rifling through these piles of papers scattered across my mind's floor, and I keep running into Tims worth mentioning. I started writing this entry in an attempt to deal with my current state of depression. There are still a lot of Tims to talk about, but I think I'll end here. I mean, come on, haven't I written enough? How many "How to Maintain a Popular and Successful Blog" rules have I broken today?
I will end on a positive note, though. Amidst all the stuff that's been dragging me down lately (like I said before, I hate saying anything that might sound like I'm grumbling or whining about life, but I have to be honest about my lengthy disappearance from the online community), there is the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. There is always hope. I am confident in that.
Sorry this is so long. I'm making up for three weeks of inactivity. And just think: there's even more to come.
— Dead-Logic
[Continue on to part two]
[Read previous "Journey of One" entries: Journey of One]
