Worth Writing

Fading Away

When I was about the height of the dining room table they sat at on bridge night my “Uncle” and godfather asked me in a boisterous, booming voice, “So!  Tell us!  What do you want to be when you grow up?!”  I smelled a set up somehow but answered honestly; “I want to be a zoologist.”  At that the whole table of adults burst out laughing, but none as heartily as my “Uncle” who, wiping tears from his eyes, fairly well shouted, “Well it’s nice to have pipe dreams!”

I burned with hatred for him right then.  I knew what I wanted to be and was well capable of becoming an explorer, a knowledgeable documenter of fascinating wild creatures and their behaviours.  I think I’m doing that now in a way.  It was a desire inspired by the encyclopedia sets and National Geographics I pored over to fill myself up with knowledge to make myself valuable.  It was a desire born also of shows like Mutual of Omaha.  I dreamed of being far, far away with other people in other cultures very different from what I was experiencing right then.

I started practicing for my career of documenting what I saw on my travels through remote forests, jungles, and deserts by writing stories about animals and exploration.  My stories, far from being fraught with the excitement and adventure I intended to practice writing about, read like bible parables focusing entirely on morality and comforting the fearful, understanding the embarrassed.  I graduated to writing stories of survival, but always exploring motive and morality issues with the strongest emphasis on compassion. 

I began to dream of growing up to write stories with the point of encouraging loyalty, honesty, compassion, and the courage to tell one’s deepest, scariest secrets in order to be free and safe once and for all.  It is a desire that has not died in my heart over the decades, but in my early teenage years it became obvious the dream would remain only a dream as addiction, drinking, and the inexplicable exhaustion that began years earlier completely drowned me.  By the time I entered high school I had become largely disengaged from life on a core level and have never fully reattached myself, not even when I was raising two children myself.

The detaching started with the incidences of my mother shutting me up alone in the dark that so utterly terrified me.  Those were times when I was too young and short to reach the light switches to turn the lights back on or when I was in the basement because the light switch was at the top of the stairs.  I would cry and beg her to turn them on again and she would either come rushing back in beating me wildly all over demanding repeatedly, “Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!  Shut up!” before she rushed back out leaving my aching and sobbing in the dark, or there would be utter silence.  In the silence I would be sure I heard monsters and madmen moving toward me so I’d clamp my hands over my ears and concentrate on the sound of my breathing. 

I continued to turn to my breathing after upsetting clashes with my mother.  I would lie on my bed with my bears pressed tightly against my ears or with a pillow pulled over my head, listening, concentrating on shutting out every feeling, every thought, every other sound except my breath.  I became so in tune with my breath I started listening to it all the time out of habit.  In time I started getting in trouble for doing ‘nothing’ too often, just lying on my back on my bed staring at the ceiling, or sitting on my desk staring out the window for hours at a time.  I would just stop caring about anything and everything for large portion of each day wherein it would take a bomb under my chair or bed to get me to do anything except be still and listen to the sound of my breathing.  I did not choose to be like that.  I did not know why it was happening.  And today, at age 39 (almost 40) I am begging someone to make it stop happening now so I can have a life.

It may be depression, it may be something else, but my lack of productivity was complained about vociferously by my family right up until we parted ways.  My mother and sister attacked my character viciously and repeatedly over the issue, attacks that drove me deeper and deeper into a state of real physical exhaustion that I have never understood.  I have said often, “I am too young to be this old.”  This blog entry comes very late in the day because every time I got up off the chair, couch, or bed to try and do something ‘productive’ today I merely staggered somewhere else to rest and listen to myself breathe for a while longer.

Perhaps, you might say, this is taking too much of a toll on my and I should stop for a while, but the years of profound anger and heartbreak are behind me.  I’m so tired so much of the time anyway that in a way it actually feels good to have a reason to feel drained, and I do feel this draining me.  What I know for sure is that nothing changes if nothing changes.  For a while anyway I plan to be tired for a reason.