ForFuckSake

Email from one of my two therapists today

Hi XXXX,
Thank you for forwarding the article to me  and making your salient point.  I have to admit, as I think back on our sessions and what you were saying to me,   I may have had my own agenda in wanting to find ways to provide you  with ways of feeling better.  I guess that is just the nature of being in this field.  But I can see your point that a piece of it may have contributed to you feeling even more misunderstood and lonely and bad about yourself.  I get it, and if I didn’t fully get it before then I apologize to you for it now.     Please keep in touch and if you were to reconsider and want to come in for a session or so my door is always open to you.  Despite the above premise,  I still think that a connection between people is something valuable. Wishing you well

Conundrum

People who know me IRL, Internet speak for “in real life,” would say I’m a bit of a conundrum. Besides being one of my favorite wines, it aptly describes me, for I live a life veiled in secrecy. It’s the only way I know how to protect myself. When it comes to others, I love to listen, pry, and see what I can do to help. But for myself, not so much. Mainly, I don’t think what I have to say or what’s going on in my life is all that important or interesting. Secondly, I’ve been burned way too many times. I’m a jaded New Yorker, a kid from Queens who learned a long time ago about the dangers of telling too much.

It doesn’t make it right or healthy, but it’s one of the rules I live by. I’m not exactly Travis Bickle, but I can relate to him a bit. I’m quick to change topics when the bottle spins and lands on me. I know it aggravates people who know me. It’s like that awkward moment playing spin the bottle when you don’t want to kiss that person who spun you.I just feel like I’d rather be kissing someone else, anyone else — just get the bottle away from me.

I know this isn’t a good way to live, but hey, I’m not here to tell anyone to live life by my rules. I’m better at telling people how to live their lives. It’s like the .250 lifetime batting average baseball player who goes on to become a hitting instructor. Just because we couldn’t do it, doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re talking about. We just couldn’t do it for ourselves. That’s the conundrum.

one

One

Have you ever met someone you were very attracted to and thought about all the time?  You know, that feeling when you check your email and phone constantly in hopes of a new message? Sometimes — especially in the beginning — the excitement and attraction is enough to overlook certain things.

Like the bad kissing.  You figure, “Well, over time we’ll get into a groove.  Or better yet, I’ll teach him/her how to kiss properly.  (Because we all think we’re the best kissers out there and can mentor others).

We’ve all had the experience where you have someone you really want and put him/her on this almost-impossible-to-live-up-to pedestal.  The anticipation builds up, and then the sex is just…eh. It’s disappointing.  Things don’t go well; body parts just don’t align right.  It’s lacking and just not like sex with ______.

Then you have the times where the person is just good for the sack.  For whatever reason the universe has in store, it just works. It was cataclysmic while it lasted, but now The Big Bang is over, and there is nothing left.

Now here’s the hard scenario: As you get older and date more people, you sometimes have the unfortunate experience  of realizing that no one will match the chemistry of that one great love(r) you had.  You know which one I mean. The One.

There are plenty of people who make our hearts flutter, but that one person — no matter how long it’s been — makes you queasy.  When you kissed that person, it was truly perfect. More intimate than sex. You’re lucky to do it once in your life.  As you grow older, you realize, “Shit, am I really never going to have that chemistry, that passion, that perfect kiss again, let alone with someone I can spend the rest of my life with?”

She got away from me 10 years ago.  There hasn’t been a day since, that I don’t think about her in some way, whether it be a fantasy or seeing places that we used to go or having my own loneliness bring me back to her.  Everyday.

I used to wonder, “Does she ever think about me?”  Ever?

I think I found out the answer to that recently.  Of course, Facebook would be the medium to answer what I’d pondered.  I knew through the grapevine that she was married.  She had cheated on me and dumped me for this guy.  After a few brief messages on Facebook, each one containing fewer and fewer words, it was clear to me that she’s very happy.  She has her husband and two kids.

She asked about me.  I have neither the spouse nor the children.  I looked through her photos, and she looks the same as she did 10 years ago. My heart skipped a beat.  It also dawned on me that she hadn’t thought about me.  At least not in the way I had hoped she did.  I am merely an afterthought of a past she doesn’t think about much.

On death row, they allow the inmates to choose once last meal, to allow them that one final fulfillment of sorts.  God knows, I hope to never find myself in that predicament.  But if I did, I wouldn’t choose a meal.  I would ask for one last kiss from her.  That’s the way I would want to remember this life.  Then I could die in peace.

Ripple

“Every story starts with something is wrong, something is rotten in Denmark, right? That’s rule one.  Something needs to be healed, the land needs is broken, and I think for me it comes from my mom dying, she died when i was like 11 or 12, if that didn’t happen I don’t know where i would be.  Its a game changer. You’re living one way, I’m a kid from Queens, and then -boom, your mother is just gone.  You’re too young to deal with it, so you just wall it off, you scab over it.  I didn’t cry at her funeral, you know, its just the age you are at, and you think it didn’t do anything, you’re a little numb. And then later when all of the sudden a girl wants to break up with you while you are in college, you’re devastated, its like……the monster comes out you look at Swingers. Swingers is funny.  Hahaha he can’t get over the girl that leaves him. Well, that’s me trying to deal with my mother I think.  That’s what made him that way, thats why I get so heartbroken… Because it touches some other deep fissure in my guts.”

Jon Favreau- Iconoclasts

My mother left when I was 13 years old.  When I say left, I mean that she took my sister and left my father and me.  She wanted nothing to do with either of us.  My mother left, because she was having an affair.  My parents tried to keep everything hush hush, but I could hear them argue from my bedroom with the covers pulled over my head.  My dad couldn’t deal when my mother left.  He was isolated and drinking and soon started to date.  He left me home alone.

I was 13, in middle school, going through puberty. I was full of rage, depression, sadness and mostly, abandonment. I started drinking a year later, at 14.  Many women have talked about having daddy issues, but I have mommy issues.  Many men choose to act out these issues by being a “player”, mistreating women, or by simply being a dick. More men than will ever admit or realize that their beavior may stem from somewhere.  For me, it took reaching a certain age in my life, where I needed to look inside, to see where this was coming from.  I’m not sure how many men are motivated to do this - it isn’t easy.

I’m constantly striving for that maternal love that I feel I missed.  I have more female friends than male friends, but I never view my interest in female friends as something that I want to blossom into a romantic relationship.  For me, it’s so much deeper.  When I develop these friendships, I’m afraid I’ll lose them.  Somewhere deep inside of me, every woman triggers a fear of abandonment.  I fear that I’m incapable of being in a romantic relationship because of all these issues.

For 20 years, I was filled with anger and emptiness that can’t be described.  The hole is so deep that I don’t think it could ever be filled again.  I started drinking, because it was — and still is — the only way I could deal with the pain. I had no one to talk to.  Back then in the 80’s, there was a new phenomenon being talked about — latchkey kids.  We were kids who came home from school alone and were expected to cook our own food, keep busy, do our homework, and live a normal life.  My life was anything normal, my life was more like KIDS.

I had no one to look after me, and my dad was always working and dating other women.  My friends, my crew as they were known to be, were from one-parent families, too.  We would drink Cisco (pre Mad Dog days) and forties and buy dime bags at Washington Square Park.  We never had Christmas like most people did or dinner with anyone, but we had each other. I am friends with them to this day.  It helped me get though those years. The addictions and emptiness carry on with me to this day too.

When I was 33, I got a phone call a little after 6 a.m.  Any phone call between midnight and 6 a.m. is never good.  It was my father.  He said, ” I need to tell you something.  Your mother is very sick.  She’s at Sloan-Kettering with cancer. It’s spread to her liver, uterus, and stomach, and she wants to see you.”

My father wanted an answer, would I go see her.  I told him I needed five minutes to think about it.  I hadn’t seen her in 20 years.  I only had visions of what she might look like.  There were many years, what I had wondered what she was up to. Had she ever thought about me.   I had so much anger and resentment.  Did I want to go to the hospital, and say, “Fuck you. You ruined my life when you left me. I hate you. I have all these issues because of you.”  Or did I want to be the bigger man, the man I taught myself to be and that she didn’t, and go to the hospital and fulfill her wish.  I didn’t owe her anything.

I decided to that going to the hospital was more important than taking the opportunity to express everything I’d held inside for 20 years.  So I went.  It was hard and awkward and there wasn’t much to say. Walking into the hospital, and down the corridor, every emotion I have felt for the last 20 years was running through my body.  My mother was a stranger to me; I felt no emotion, not a tear dropped from my eye.  She apologized, but some apologies just don’t go very far.  When I went home, I drank my Jameson and thought about it all.  I never saw her again.

Friends

Have you ever been stabbed in the back
By someone you thought was really cool
Did they steal your heart or was it money
Or was it lies they told
Strangers just disguised as your friends
Never again cause now you know

That friends will let you down
Friends wont be around
When you need them most
Where are your friend

Friends are hard to find
Friends, yours and mine
Im talkin ‘bout your friends.

Smiles they hide behind
Never know whats on their mind
Could be true deception
Jealousy and envy reign
They never want to see you get ahead
They just hold you back

Jody Watley- Friends

I broke up with a friend today. It was very Seinfeld-esque. It even happened in a dinner. We were friends for 10 years. I used to joke that we had a give-take relationship — I would give, and she would take. But after 10 years, it wasn’t so funny anymore. I couldn’t let someone keep emotionally draining or taking advantage, or making me feel worse about me.

Because of my age, I have gone through this a few times already. You have friends who marry and have kids that you simply grow apart from. It’s a constant evolving process. For good or for bad, that’s what it is. Sometimes, you realize that the “friends” you surround yourself with have ulterior motives. Breaking up with a friend isn’t something new, but it always comes with that sense of loss, that sense of wishing you could go back in time when things were how they used to be — the memories, laughter, the ability to talk/text/IM all day with ease, knowing you weren’t intruding on their day.

Losing and gaining friends is a part of life, like death and taxes. When I was younger, I thought the friends I made, would be friends forever. Things changed. People got married; some of them had kids. We had a lot less in common. The awkwardness overcame the ease that once allowed us to enjoy each other’s company without having to do too much. Then it became work, and I don’t need a second job.

Recently, Mo made a post about friends and her clearing out some dead wood. Besides having gone through this several times, I had this discussion with a friend of mine about what was going on in her life. She’s about 10 years younger than me. My friend’s life is in a different place than it was a few years ago, and the people who were close to her are no longer coming around. They had great times together — going out, drinking (cocktails have kept many a friendship intact), hanging out in NYC as twenty-something women. But my friend’s life took a drastic turn. She saw that these people were coming around less, and when they did, they mainly complained about their lives — meeting or not meeting men, such and such party, the scene at the latest restaurant, and who went home with who. It was all so inconsequential to what my friend was going through. She couldn’t relate to her former friends. It was obvious they had no interest in learning about what was going on in her life, since she was not the same person they were anymore.

I have gone through something similar. For me, it involved being hospitalized. There’s nothing like being in a hospital to see who your real friends are. There were plenty of text messages, like, “Will try and come by” or “I’m working a lot, see if I can stop by”. Work is too much? Really? I was in the hospital, and it wasn’t with a broken limb or minor cut. I looked at the people who came by day after day, and I knew who my real friends were. For me, there was a common theme — they are all people who grew up in New York like me. Some were friends from childhood; some were friends I’d met through the years. All are native New Yorkers. They seem to have different priorities; they seem to know what’s important. I’m not a Scientologist sociologist, but that was the common theme that kept coming through.

An old school New York guy I know once asked me, “Will you do me a favor?” I replied, “What’s the favor?” He said, “When a friend asks you for a favor, the answer should always be yes. A real friend would never ask for a favor that would put you in jeopardy or that you wouldn’t consider doing.” Now when anyone asks, “Can you do me a favor?” I always reply yes.

There are different categories of people in your life, including: drinking buddies (who can be a blast), people who always tell you what’s going on in their life but never ask about your life, people who never hang out in your apartment though you visit theirs, people who you learn have different agendas and motivations than you realized when you first met them…

Friends are different. For me, loyalty is a key component. It’s easy to have people around you when you’re on top. What separates the people you know from your friends is seeing who’s standing with you at your lowest point.