The Long Road to Recovery
Life always throws curve balls. Whether it's having to get your car fixed, or losing someone near and dear, the only thing we are given to know for certain is that the path between where we are and wherever we're going will be tumultuous.
Growing up as a mistake didn't help. Whether I was locked in my room to keep me from wandering around the house during my parents' self-determined personal hours, curled up in the bed above the Winnebago Elándan's captain's chairs, or riding around for hours in the backseat of a car while my parents went to other people's houses, I always felt like an afterthought. It's shocking to think back and realize how much of my early childhood had to do with sex. Not only did I become (painfully) aware of sex at an early age, but sex seemed to drive every aspect of my parents' existence while they were together--even into my teenage years. This was, obviously, both addictive and unhealthy.
When I was very young, perhaps five years old, I awoke in a hotel room in Las Vegas to the sound of a tall, dark man entering the hotel room. He walked past me to my parents' bed, and the three of them proceeded in revelry. After he had gone, I went to ask my parents what had happened. My mother burst into tears, and my father told me not to believe her, because she could turn her tears on and off like water. This exchange was emblematic of the entire relationship between my parents, and also of their relationship to me. Sitting on that bed, I knew that something was horribly wrong, and I knew that my parents were the cause. I think that it was then, or around that time, that I began to implode.
It's important to understand that abused and neglected children love their parents, just like any other child.
You grow up; whether that's in a filthy home that nobody ever cleans because everyone is depressed, or with an alcoholic that gets mad and beats you, or with a smoker that subjects you to their three-packs-a-day habit, or in a trailer where everyone's on edge because there's not enough space inside to think, you grow up. You tell your parents the things they say they want to hear, even if those things hurt. You learn to adapt to your environment, but you also learn to rebel against your environment. Sometimes that rebellion takes an unhealthy form.
I think there's an instinctive part of us that realizes the necessity for change, without conceptualizing what form that change should take. There is something inside of us that will explode when it is put under enough pressure (we are, after all, made of stardust). When that happens, the eruption has the effect of pushing anyone and everyone away in order to make space for the self to survive.
That's what happened to me.
This eruption is not a smooth process; it's not like "bang" and gone. Of course, it can be--the way you shut the door in the face of someone who is trying to sell a magazine subscription, for example. But when a person is subjected to someone else's toxicity over the course of a couple of decades, their inner being compresses. It compresses to make space for the toxic person; we withdraw into ourselves in order to appease the perceptions of someone who believes (perhaps with some truth) that they are more powerful, more important.
They are also more needy. They are needier not because we are not needy, but because we suppress our own needs to focus on the cause of their anger/depression/addiction. We appease, survive, and compress.
I never understood the concept of dating. I wanted true love, though I honestly had no idea what that meant for me. I had a hole inside that needed filling, a cavity where I had placed the remnants of my compressed self.
I had no idea that I was about to explode.
My first relationship, at fourteen, was casual. I didn't understand that it was casual, because she was Catholic, and I was (ostensibly) Mormon, and we had no language between us to communicate things like casual relationships. She was going to get married someday (which she did) and I was going to find my one true love (which I eventually did) and it seemed like a good fit. Of course, to her, any of the fourteen-year-old boys who were trying to grab her attention were possible future candidates, a fact which I didn't understand until I overheard one of her mother's conversations while waiting on the porch one evening.
She was beautiful, and popular, and in demand.
I was beautiful, too--but I didn't realize that until much later in life. At the moment I discovered that I wasn't her one true love, I became hurt, and I withdrew. I continued to see her, but I pressed for commitment. Her mother tried to explain to me that this was the wrong path to take, but I didn't understand until many years later why other people shouldn't approach love the same way I did--which was to shrink, and make space, and try to heal the broken person.
She was not a broken person, and we didn't continue to see each other for much longer. However, I repeated the pattern with my other girlfriends in high school, along with the push for commitment and subsequent withdrawals--that familiar pattern of a codependent person seeking out another codependent person whom they can blame for all of their woes. My friends didn't understand, in retrospect, why I was so hurt by my high school relationships. I was treating two-month flings as full-fledged marriages, and breakups as divorces.
I was entirely unaware of what I was doing.
On one level, I was seeking out the type of relationship that my parents had, which was full of teary drama and insidious backstabbing, as well as horrific breakups and romantic reunions. I was willing to put up with just about anything, because my parents had demonstrated to me that love was a willingness to be hurt--or even abused. I unknowingly played this same role in my relationship with my father whenever my mother wasn't living with us. I learned to stay in the house and withdraw. Moreover, I expected the same from my partners, and there were plenty of willing partners over the years who wanted to help me. I unintentionally sought those types of relationships, relationships in which my problems took center stage.
What I didn't know is that I would intentionally push all of these people away eventually, including my own parents.
I began to ignite in the late 1990s--slowly, like the lighting of a fuse no-one can hear or see. I began to mutilate myself with knives because I believed that my life had no value. Although I made various attempts, I could never carry out any action that was extreme enough to end my own life.
I believe that this semi-suicidal phase can arise when the individual feels there is no escape from their current situation but death. I don't know if it can arise under other circumstances, but, in my case, I now feel that my psyche had reached the limit of what it could contain. I felt trapped. I was constantly pushing back against my father, not only in the way that most teenagers struggle for their autonomy, but in a way that seemed to declare that I was becoming physically stronger and would no longer be intimidated simply because my father felt that it was necessary.
The last time my father initiated physical contact as a means of punishment was when I was 14 years old. He slapped me for disrespecting him. I think I may have even told him at that point that someday I would be stronger. He knew that this was true. What I don't think he ever understood was why I had such animosity toward him. He had tried to explain to me the nature of his lascivious relationship with my mother; he was from the 1960s, after all, and his generation did things like that. This was a preposterous explanation for his sexual addiction; his sexual addiction sprang from his loneliness, and was, by extension, both a survival mechanism and a mode of existence that emphasized his own patriarchal need for control. His loneliness, in turn, sprang from his own childhood survival of his mother's acutely abusive behavior, which was followed by nearly a decade of institutionalization in boarding schools and prisons.
In retrospect, he didn't seem to understand that his sexual behavior had damaged my ability to process normal human emotions, and that his need for comfort and control had stifled my development. In his mind, he was a loving father who took a staunchly conservative approach to stern parenting on a number of occasions--and, without question, he did love and provide for me, as best he could. He would have fundamentally agreed with the statement, "Spare the rod, and spoil the child." In my case, the "rod" that he used did not resemble the durable live tree branches that his own mother forced him to collect for his own beatings before locking him in a dark closet for extended periods of time; but, in his own way, he repeated that scenario with me.
I was terrified of his hands, and I was often confined to my room.
For certain things, there was no discussion. If I didn't come when I was called, I would get a spanking. If I ever talked back to either of my parents, I would get a spanking. My father's spankings were so hard that I once came down the stairs wearing six pairs of underwear in hopes that I would not have to feel the sting. I couldn't have been much older than six. I realize now that for a full-grown man to inflict that much pain on a child cannot qualify as anything but abuse, but he always calmly explained to me the reason; I had done wrong, and had to be punished. Abstract punishments, such as the removal of certain privileges, wouldn't have been sufficient for him. My father maintained strict physical control over his wife and child.
My mother was also terrified, although I don't know why.
She left him dozens of times, and returned each time; sometimes weeks later, sometimes years later. She used me as the excuse for playing the victim (staying) when she was around, and when she was gone, my father would tell me that she didn't love me. She was a legal assistant; at any time, she could have buried him in legal troubles up to his ears. But he threatened that she would never see me again, and she went for it. She played the helpless woman. I resented her for that from my teenage years into adulthood; she was a literary genius, financially stable, and anything but helpless; but, she was accustomed to playing a subservient role and did so until her death (first with my father, then with her final husband).
As a result, my father used her at his whim. He used her emotionally, and he used her sexually. He used her for financial gain. It may have been true that she didn't have the same motherly instincts as other women; then again, perhaps they were stripped away from her as she came to associate family life with physical and emotional pain. Her refusal to fight back, or to resolve to leave him permanently, led to her alienation from her other sons. At one time, she was very bitter about this, and got into the habit of negatively comparing me to them whenever I did something that she didn't like. She would never directly confront her problem, which was the fact that she was addicted to an abusive relationship with my father.
I had the same addiction. My father was a lovable man, as long as it was clear to everyone that he was in control. The conservative religious organizations that he associated with fully supported him in his male dominance. But beneath the layers of machismo was a cell-block intellectual with a fierce desire to overcome his own adversity, improve upon his shortcomings and provide a better life for his child than he had had. There wasn't a 1990s movie that he and I didn't watch, and I usually fell asleep in his bedroom; we had a Nintendo and a series of role-playing games that we both enjoyed, and we would spend countless nights in those universes of fantasy, fleshing out our character ideas with one another, and talking about life. He was my best friend and my constant companion, and I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone else in my life.
But, I exploded.
When I was sixteen years old, I sang in jazz choir, I played bass in jazz choir, I played guitar in jazz band, I played guitar in another band, I studied French, I hated mathematics, and I loved Mr. Corkrum, who assigned Black Boy by Richard Wright to our sophomore English class. The standard curriculum called for To Kill A Mockingbird, which we also read, but Mr. Corkrum was one of those teachers who demanded excellence in critical thought. That reading assignment probably laid the foundation for some of my later experiences.
I began working at the theatre, and then for a men's clothing store. My father had lost his job about two years beforehand, and had subsequently become disabled while attending the University of Washington. At one point, the Social Security Administration discontinued his payments, and I had to take a full time job at a grocery store to help us pay rent.
I dropped out of high school.
I resented the changes. I had finally gotten to a point in high school where I knew who my friends were; I liked my friends, I liked the attention I got from some of my crushes, and I liked the fact that I had been pulling through despite having to deal with the turmoil of hospitals, doctors, my father's failing health, and my inconvenient work schedule. But halfway through my junior year, it became too much. I tried an alternative school, and then I left school completely. I wouldn't set foot inside Lynnwood High School again until the year before they tore the old building down.
Working to support our small family meant that I didn't feel I should be invisible any longer. I got my GED at North Seattle Community College (under the name "James"), and I even got an employee-of-the-month award for my hard work. My superiors saw me as a valuable employee. I pushed hard for the use of the car, and eventually my father gave it to me and bought himself a van. He was limited in his mobility, and so he needed something that could cart his wheelchair around.
During this time, I was falling in love. Until the day that I die, I will wish that I could take the emotional maturity and wisdom that I have today and travel back in time to be with the young woman who took me in to her family's house in Monroe. She gave me love, a home, a family, and hope for the future; I gave her the only love that I knew how to give, which became toxic over the course of several months.
And then, I exploded.
I think that woman's love was the catalyst. I think I simultaneously became jealous of the middle-class life she had, angry at my own parents for not providing that kind of life, disappointed with myself for not being able to do more for myself and my parents, and generally diffident. I was frustrated that I was not able to follow the path I wanted to follow--one that included writing and composing music on some property near Portland, Oregon with the woman whom I could only see as my future wife.
My mother had a stroke.
In typical fashion, my father and I went to Colorado Springs to rescue her. We took the van, and I drove from Washington to Colorado because he was sick. Somehow, at the end of that journey, the two of them were once again romantically involved, and I was once again an afterthought.
Upon returning to Seattle, my relationship fell apart. We tried living with my dying parents in a tiny apartment, and it was too much for her. We tried seeing other people, and I beat her to the punch. She withdrew.
I became addicted to methamphetamine.
It wasn't intentional--nobody, you know, intends to get addicted to meth. But I was lonely, and confused, and I had been put on a back burner by my parents' codependency, and I was looking for something to fill the hole inside, and it was meth. I discovered it while partying with some friends, and I instantly felt like I was in love again.
Then I drained my bank accounts, and my parents' bank accounts, and some bank accounts I no longer had, and some bank accounts that weren't mine, and I wound up in a heap of criminal and financial trouble that to this day I have not gotten out of. I threatened to commit suicide with a shotgun I had bought, and my father called the cops. I wound up in Harborview.
My father had also been an addict; he was 21 years clean. During his addiction, he had alienated an entire family with his behavior, and had to change his identity to avoid the law.
On the way to the hospital, I told the police that my father was a fugitive. I didn't know what I was doing; I was enraged and out of control due to my intensive use of amphetamines, and moreover, whatever had gone off inside my head that year was incinerating every aspect of my life. The remnants of my relationship, now unsalvageable, were like ashes scattered to the four winds. My car was in shambles. I had no job to speak of. I had dropped out of classes at North Seattle Community College. I was about to become homeless.
My parents bought a trailer in a 55-and-over park where I could not live. I tried staying there illegally for two weeks and was kicked out. I lived in my father's van for a while and worked for McDonald's. Eventually, one of my junkie friends crashed the van. I slept in dumpsters for a couple of weeks, and then tried going back to the trailer park. When that didn't work, I stayed in drug houses. I bought a new car and tried sleeping in that. I was always tired, and any money I got went to meth.
I tried going back to the Mormon church, but nobody there could understand where I was coming from. The divide between my life experiences and those of the middle-class bible thumpers was already too great. I tried getting into another relationship, but we were different types of train wrecks, and we never got on the right track (though I did try to spread my toxicity to her by suggesting that she should physically and emotionally abuse me).
In November, 2001, the FBI came to get my father to extradite him to California to face charges. Six months later, he died in the Santa Rita County Jail Hospital. I only saw him once while he was incarcerated. If he had ever faced trial, I doubt the prosecutor would have had enough evidence to convict him. Nevertheless, he was gone; he was gone, because I had sent him away.
I went crazy over the next year; I was twice institutionalized, and I caused a lot of emotional pain for a lot of people, some of whom I cared about. My explosion phase would continue until I pushed away not only my parents, but anyone who had known them as well. It was only after my mother's death that I began to stabilize; as painful as it was, my mother's death was the catalyst for my own process of maturity, which forced me to take steps to say goodbye to my own abusive relationship and to reexamine my perspectives about the world.
I have a handful of old friends and family members that I still keep in contact with, but most of the relationships that I have now were developed after my mother's death, and even after my mourning period. I am a much different person today than I was three and one-half years ago, when she died. I am no longer exploding. I am healthy and productive, and things are getting better. I honestly think that my parents' relationship triggered some sort of survival mechanism; like a deep abyss, it is not necessarily anything I want to explore further.
I believe the worst is over. I do wish I could go back and undo some of the destruction that was caused by my eight-year outburst, but time is a one-way street. At least now I am traveling down that long road in control of my faculties and fully aware of my surroundings. More importantly, I have a sense of where I'm headed.
Recovery is indeed a long road; but through it all, the human spirit survives.
Growing up as a mistake didn't help. Whether I was locked in my room to keep me from wandering around the house during my parents' self-determined personal hours, curled up in the bed above the Winnebago Elándan's captain's chairs, or riding around for hours in the backseat of a car while my parents went to other people's houses, I always felt like an afterthought. It's shocking to think back and realize how much of my early childhood had to do with sex. Not only did I become (painfully) aware of sex at an early age, but sex seemed to drive every aspect of my parents' existence while they were together--even into my teenage years. This was, obviously, both addictive and unhealthy.
When I was very young, perhaps five years old, I awoke in a hotel room in Las Vegas to the sound of a tall, dark man entering the hotel room. He walked past me to my parents' bed, and the three of them proceeded in revelry. After he had gone, I went to ask my parents what had happened. My mother burst into tears, and my father told me not to believe her, because she could turn her tears on and off like water. This exchange was emblematic of the entire relationship between my parents, and also of their relationship to me. Sitting on that bed, I knew that something was horribly wrong, and I knew that my parents were the cause. I think that it was then, or around that time, that I began to implode.
It's important to understand that abused and neglected children love their parents, just like any other child.
You grow up; whether that's in a filthy home that nobody ever cleans because everyone is depressed, or with an alcoholic that gets mad and beats you, or with a smoker that subjects you to their three-packs-a-day habit, or in a trailer where everyone's on edge because there's not enough space inside to think, you grow up. You tell your parents the things they say they want to hear, even if those things hurt. You learn to adapt to your environment, but you also learn to rebel against your environment. Sometimes that rebellion takes an unhealthy form.
I think there's an instinctive part of us that realizes the necessity for change, without conceptualizing what form that change should take. There is something inside of us that will explode when it is put under enough pressure (we are, after all, made of stardust). When that happens, the eruption has the effect of pushing anyone and everyone away in order to make space for the self to survive.
That's what happened to me.
This eruption is not a smooth process; it's not like "bang" and gone. Of course, it can be--the way you shut the door in the face of someone who is trying to sell a magazine subscription, for example. But when a person is subjected to someone else's toxicity over the course of a couple of decades, their inner being compresses. It compresses to make space for the toxic person; we withdraw into ourselves in order to appease the perceptions of someone who believes (perhaps with some truth) that they are more powerful, more important.
They are also more needy. They are needier not because we are not needy, but because we suppress our own needs to focus on the cause of their anger/depression/addiction. We appease, survive, and compress.
I never understood the concept of dating. I wanted true love, though I honestly had no idea what that meant for me. I had a hole inside that needed filling, a cavity where I had placed the remnants of my compressed self.
I had no idea that I was about to explode.
My first relationship, at fourteen, was casual. I didn't understand that it was casual, because she was Catholic, and I was (ostensibly) Mormon, and we had no language between us to communicate things like casual relationships. She was going to get married someday (which she did) and I was going to find my one true love (which I eventually did) and it seemed like a good fit. Of course, to her, any of the fourteen-year-old boys who were trying to grab her attention were possible future candidates, a fact which I didn't understand until I overheard one of her mother's conversations while waiting on the porch one evening.
She was beautiful, and popular, and in demand.
I was beautiful, too--but I didn't realize that until much later in life. At the moment I discovered that I wasn't her one true love, I became hurt, and I withdrew. I continued to see her, but I pressed for commitment. Her mother tried to explain to me that this was the wrong path to take, but I didn't understand until many years later why other people shouldn't approach love the same way I did--which was to shrink, and make space, and try to heal the broken person.
She was not a broken person, and we didn't continue to see each other for much longer. However, I repeated the pattern with my other girlfriends in high school, along with the push for commitment and subsequent withdrawals--that familiar pattern of a codependent person seeking out another codependent person whom they can blame for all of their woes. My friends didn't understand, in retrospect, why I was so hurt by my high school relationships. I was treating two-month flings as full-fledged marriages, and breakups as divorces.
I was entirely unaware of what I was doing.
On one level, I was seeking out the type of relationship that my parents had, which was full of teary drama and insidious backstabbing, as well as horrific breakups and romantic reunions. I was willing to put up with just about anything, because my parents had demonstrated to me that love was a willingness to be hurt--or even abused. I unknowingly played this same role in my relationship with my father whenever my mother wasn't living with us. I learned to stay in the house and withdraw. Moreover, I expected the same from my partners, and there were plenty of willing partners over the years who wanted to help me. I unintentionally sought those types of relationships, relationships in which my problems took center stage.
What I didn't know is that I would intentionally push all of these people away eventually, including my own parents.
I began to ignite in the late 1990s--slowly, like the lighting of a fuse no-one can hear or see. I began to mutilate myself with knives because I believed that my life had no value. Although I made various attempts, I could never carry out any action that was extreme enough to end my own life.
I believe that this semi-suicidal phase can arise when the individual feels there is no escape from their current situation but death. I don't know if it can arise under other circumstances, but, in my case, I now feel that my psyche had reached the limit of what it could contain. I felt trapped. I was constantly pushing back against my father, not only in the way that most teenagers struggle for their autonomy, but in a way that seemed to declare that I was becoming physically stronger and would no longer be intimidated simply because my father felt that it was necessary.
The last time my father initiated physical contact as a means of punishment was when I was 14 years old. He slapped me for disrespecting him. I think I may have even told him at that point that someday I would be stronger. He knew that this was true. What I don't think he ever understood was why I had such animosity toward him. He had tried to explain to me the nature of his lascivious relationship with my mother; he was from the 1960s, after all, and his generation did things like that. This was a preposterous explanation for his sexual addiction; his sexual addiction sprang from his loneliness, and was, by extension, both a survival mechanism and a mode of existence that emphasized his own patriarchal need for control. His loneliness, in turn, sprang from his own childhood survival of his mother's acutely abusive behavior, which was followed by nearly a decade of institutionalization in boarding schools and prisons.
In retrospect, he didn't seem to understand that his sexual behavior had damaged my ability to process normal human emotions, and that his need for comfort and control had stifled my development. In his mind, he was a loving father who took a staunchly conservative approach to stern parenting on a number of occasions--and, without question, he did love and provide for me, as best he could. He would have fundamentally agreed with the statement, "Spare the rod, and spoil the child." In my case, the "rod" that he used did not resemble the durable live tree branches that his own mother forced him to collect for his own beatings before locking him in a dark closet for extended periods of time; but, in his own way, he repeated that scenario with me.
I was terrified of his hands, and I was often confined to my room.
For certain things, there was no discussion. If I didn't come when I was called, I would get a spanking. If I ever talked back to either of my parents, I would get a spanking. My father's spankings were so hard that I once came down the stairs wearing six pairs of underwear in hopes that I would not have to feel the sting. I couldn't have been much older than six. I realize now that for a full-grown man to inflict that much pain on a child cannot qualify as anything but abuse, but he always calmly explained to me the reason; I had done wrong, and had to be punished. Abstract punishments, such as the removal of certain privileges, wouldn't have been sufficient for him. My father maintained strict physical control over his wife and child.
My mother was also terrified, although I don't know why.
She left him dozens of times, and returned each time; sometimes weeks later, sometimes years later. She used me as the excuse for playing the victim (staying) when she was around, and when she was gone, my father would tell me that she didn't love me. She was a legal assistant; at any time, she could have buried him in legal troubles up to his ears. But he threatened that she would never see me again, and she went for it. She played the helpless woman. I resented her for that from my teenage years into adulthood; she was a literary genius, financially stable, and anything but helpless; but, she was accustomed to playing a subservient role and did so until her death (first with my father, then with her final husband).
As a result, my father used her at his whim. He used her emotionally, and he used her sexually. He used her for financial gain. It may have been true that she didn't have the same motherly instincts as other women; then again, perhaps they were stripped away from her as she came to associate family life with physical and emotional pain. Her refusal to fight back, or to resolve to leave him permanently, led to her alienation from her other sons. At one time, she was very bitter about this, and got into the habit of negatively comparing me to them whenever I did something that she didn't like. She would never directly confront her problem, which was the fact that she was addicted to an abusive relationship with my father.
I had the same addiction. My father was a lovable man, as long as it was clear to everyone that he was in control. The conservative religious organizations that he associated with fully supported him in his male dominance. But beneath the layers of machismo was a cell-block intellectual with a fierce desire to overcome his own adversity, improve upon his shortcomings and provide a better life for his child than he had had. There wasn't a 1990s movie that he and I didn't watch, and I usually fell asleep in his bedroom; we had a Nintendo and a series of role-playing games that we both enjoyed, and we would spend countless nights in those universes of fantasy, fleshing out our character ideas with one another, and talking about life. He was my best friend and my constant companion, and I loved him more than I have ever loved anyone else in my life.
But, I exploded.
When I was sixteen years old, I sang in jazz choir, I played bass in jazz choir, I played guitar in jazz band, I played guitar in another band, I studied French, I hated mathematics, and I loved Mr. Corkrum, who assigned Black Boy by Richard Wright to our sophomore English class. The standard curriculum called for To Kill A Mockingbird, which we also read, but Mr. Corkrum was one of those teachers who demanded excellence in critical thought. That reading assignment probably laid the foundation for some of my later experiences.
I began working at the theatre, and then for a men's clothing store. My father had lost his job about two years beforehand, and had subsequently become disabled while attending the University of Washington. At one point, the Social Security Administration discontinued his payments, and I had to take a full time job at a grocery store to help us pay rent.
I dropped out of high school.
I resented the changes. I had finally gotten to a point in high school where I knew who my friends were; I liked my friends, I liked the attention I got from some of my crushes, and I liked the fact that I had been pulling through despite having to deal with the turmoil of hospitals, doctors, my father's failing health, and my inconvenient work schedule. But halfway through my junior year, it became too much. I tried an alternative school, and then I left school completely. I wouldn't set foot inside Lynnwood High School again until the year before they tore the old building down.
Working to support our small family meant that I didn't feel I should be invisible any longer. I got my GED at North Seattle Community College (under the name "James"), and I even got an employee-of-the-month award for my hard work. My superiors saw me as a valuable employee. I pushed hard for the use of the car, and eventually my father gave it to me and bought himself a van. He was limited in his mobility, and so he needed something that could cart his wheelchair around.
During this time, I was falling in love. Until the day that I die, I will wish that I could take the emotional maturity and wisdom that I have today and travel back in time to be with the young woman who took me in to her family's house in Monroe. She gave me love, a home, a family, and hope for the future; I gave her the only love that I knew how to give, which became toxic over the course of several months.
And then, I exploded.
I think that woman's love was the catalyst. I think I simultaneously became jealous of the middle-class life she had, angry at my own parents for not providing that kind of life, disappointed with myself for not being able to do more for myself and my parents, and generally diffident. I was frustrated that I was not able to follow the path I wanted to follow--one that included writing and composing music on some property near Portland, Oregon with the woman whom I could only see as my future wife.
My mother had a stroke.
In typical fashion, my father and I went to Colorado Springs to rescue her. We took the van, and I drove from Washington to Colorado because he was sick. Somehow, at the end of that journey, the two of them were once again romantically involved, and I was once again an afterthought.
Upon returning to Seattle, my relationship fell apart. We tried living with my dying parents in a tiny apartment, and it was too much for her. We tried seeing other people, and I beat her to the punch. She withdrew.
I became addicted to methamphetamine.
It wasn't intentional--nobody, you know, intends to get addicted to meth. But I was lonely, and confused, and I had been put on a back burner by my parents' codependency, and I was looking for something to fill the hole inside, and it was meth. I discovered it while partying with some friends, and I instantly felt like I was in love again.
Then I drained my bank accounts, and my parents' bank accounts, and some bank accounts I no longer had, and some bank accounts that weren't mine, and I wound up in a heap of criminal and financial trouble that to this day I have not gotten out of. I threatened to commit suicide with a shotgun I had bought, and my father called the cops. I wound up in Harborview.
My father had also been an addict; he was 21 years clean. During his addiction, he had alienated an entire family with his behavior, and had to change his identity to avoid the law.
On the way to the hospital, I told the police that my father was a fugitive. I didn't know what I was doing; I was enraged and out of control due to my intensive use of amphetamines, and moreover, whatever had gone off inside my head that year was incinerating every aspect of my life. The remnants of my relationship, now unsalvageable, were like ashes scattered to the four winds. My car was in shambles. I had no job to speak of. I had dropped out of classes at North Seattle Community College. I was about to become homeless.
My parents bought a trailer in a 55-and-over park where I could not live. I tried staying there illegally for two weeks and was kicked out. I lived in my father's van for a while and worked for McDonald's. Eventually, one of my junkie friends crashed the van. I slept in dumpsters for a couple of weeks, and then tried going back to the trailer park. When that didn't work, I stayed in drug houses. I bought a new car and tried sleeping in that. I was always tired, and any money I got went to meth.
I tried going back to the Mormon church, but nobody there could understand where I was coming from. The divide between my life experiences and those of the middle-class bible thumpers was already too great. I tried getting into another relationship, but we were different types of train wrecks, and we never got on the right track (though I did try to spread my toxicity to her by suggesting that she should physically and emotionally abuse me).
In November, 2001, the FBI came to get my father to extradite him to California to face charges. Six months later, he died in the Santa Rita County Jail Hospital. I only saw him once while he was incarcerated. If he had ever faced trial, I doubt the prosecutor would have had enough evidence to convict him. Nevertheless, he was gone; he was gone, because I had sent him away.
I went crazy over the next year; I was twice institutionalized, and I caused a lot of emotional pain for a lot of people, some of whom I cared about. My explosion phase would continue until I pushed away not only my parents, but anyone who had known them as well. It was only after my mother's death that I began to stabilize; as painful as it was, my mother's death was the catalyst for my own process of maturity, which forced me to take steps to say goodbye to my own abusive relationship and to reexamine my perspectives about the world.
I have a handful of old friends and family members that I still keep in contact with, but most of the relationships that I have now were developed after my mother's death, and even after my mourning period. I am a much different person today than I was three and one-half years ago, when she died. I am no longer exploding. I am healthy and productive, and things are getting better. I honestly think that my parents' relationship triggered some sort of survival mechanism; like a deep abyss, it is not necessarily anything I want to explore further.
I believe the worst is over. I do wish I could go back and undo some of the destruction that was caused by my eight-year outburst, but time is a one-way street. At least now I am traveling down that long road in control of my faculties and fully aware of my surroundings. More importantly, I have a sense of where I'm headed.
Recovery is indeed a long road; but through it all, the human spirit survives.
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