The Wolves
There is a toddler named Simon Sherr who is 2 years old, and sitting in a park. His mother is too far away. A dog sees him as prey and attacks. To him this animal has teeth bigger than his hands. It growls, it bites, it grabs and shakes violently… the dog runs away from the people trying to save him. He screams… he understands death for the first time. Being eaten for the first time. Primal, instinctive… he just knows. His mother would write it off “he just thought you were a ball”…. That’s a lie… Dogs don’t kill balls, they practice killing with balls. Dogs kill living things, by snapping their necks… by shaking them… He thought Simon was prey. That boy survived. To him this was the size of a grizzly bear… that’s how he remembers it. He still suffers from acute arkoudaphobia (fear of bears) and can’t hike in the woods without crippling fear. His family thinks it’s funny. He is starting to.
There is a 6 year old boy. In a bedroom. There are wolf pelts at the foot of his bed. They still have the teeth in the heads and holes where their eyes used to be. At night they growl at him, and they breathe and they open their broken boneless crinkled jaws. Simon doesn’t know this is panic induced hallucinations because 6 year old’s don’t know those are words… or phenomena. There is a record player with “the lord of the rings” in it. The record is skipping… it makes a noise that today gives a 50 year old Simon a panic attack if he hears it… shhhhh skip… shhh skip. That boy survived. He grew up to be almost fearless. But he’s afraid of bears and may always be.
There is a boy named Simon who was once knocked unconscious with a toy rifle wielded by a boy named David Clloyd, because David’s older brother named Robbie, who wasn’t mean to Simon, said he could come watch the teens skate on the half pipe in the back yard… a real half pipe, with really good skaters. Simon stepped onto the driveway, hesitantly. He got half way down the drive way when David came at him with a toy rifle, and a baseball swing. Simon wondered why the ground was coming up to hit him. Simon woke up in the gravel. No one came to help. He survived the beatings, he survived a nearly dislocated shoulder screaming “uncle”. When Simon was fighting for real in full contact Sanshou, and was good at it… Simon once saw David at the end of an empty hallway, his walk turned to a jog. David, almost a foot shorter than Simon, sprinted. David found a hiding place (hopefully a dumpster like the trash he belonged with). The only thing Simon regrets is that he got away, that last time… he was the one who ran though, he was the one who hid. Good.
There is a 17 year old named Simon. He’s dating the best looking cheerleader at a rival high school… I say “rival” but really, they are state champions and Falls Church normally finished seasons with no wins. Simon wins a national Karate tournament shortly after being named MVP of his JV football team. His English teacher is proud of him and announces it in class. A gang member decides to kill him. He had killed before, he had done a drive by shooting of a McDonalds after he killed before. Simon knows he’s serious. That summer before he could kill him Tony was shot 4 times in his chest. Simon still hopes he thought of him as he choked to death, and no matter how much Simon heals… he won’t regret wishing that was true. Murderer.
There is a man named Simon who for the first time in his life can sit in the dark and talk to those terrified boys. Sit in a flashback not as the child but as an observer of him for the first time. Cross the room and say “look at me… you made it”… this is your wife Shona he says with a picture frame that rotates her photos (which I am glancing up at right now). Remember her face because all of this will shape you into the man who deserves her. It will all be worth it…
I wouldn’t change a thing if it meant deserving her. Not about the child. Only the man who could never visit those children because whenever he did he became them. The fear, the panic… shhhh skip…. That’s how it always starts at night, when there is no other sound…. Shhhh skip. It doesn’t say that in the dark anymore it just says “Shona is waiting and she deserves you to be whole”.
Me
Let’s do something I’ve never done. Every word of the day is about love, and being saved by Shona. Over the last month I have been in immersion therapy… Not deliberately. Not with guidance or safety. But alone in a small house with nothing but thoughts to keep me company. That man is surviving it… and growing.
Let me start with myself because this blog is always from my perspective… there is no other perspective I could write from and be honest about it. I’m a “race car on fire” (as Shona likes to put it).
The Drop
This is going to sound like name dropping, but I want people to understand the reason for it. I had a degree in computer animation a few years after Jurassic Park came out when “how do we even teach this” was an unknown. You don’t graduate from a program that didn’t exist 3 years earlier, and have a job in that field without running into people who pioneered it… because they were the only ones offering jobs… you don’t make the cover of computer graphics world more than once unless those people respect your work. I thought I knew it all, I thought I was the most brilliant mind in animation, but I was standing on the shoulders of REAL genius that I could not (even today) be. These mentors humbled me… that’s why it isn’t name dropping.
It’s also why every college student should pause and really ask not just “am I the best one in this school” because TODAY, even THOSE will be very lucky to find work because of how many people truly believe learning a piece of software is all it takes. They have to say am i better than someone with 10 years of credits… because those guys are scrounging for work. They are wrong almost every time if they say yes… and will be waiting tables with $100,000+ of debt (especially the ones that come out claiming “I’m a director” or “I’m a lead” as if anyone would ever do anything but laugh hysterically about them leading a team of students… which just means they can’t do the work themselves).
Mentors
Glenn Entis was a founder of PDI/Dreamworks and CCO/COO of EA when I first had the opportunity for him to become one of the most important mentor of my life… we spoke yesterday about my latest discovery, once my math was independently confirmed by a trusted and brilliant mathematician. He said “find physicists and keep going”.
Frank Vitz, the software engineer behind the original Pixar computer used for the original Tron. A brilliant mind trained in painting in Italy who could run circles around any software engineer in graphics since computer graphics became words that fit together. A singer and songwriter, who I’ve had the pleasure of many jam sessions around camp fires. I am going to go see him in Vancouver when we can afford it.
Diana Walczak – THE sculptor of our generation (Generation X). She founded Kleiser-Walczak with her husband, and did the first ever digital stunt double on the original “Judge Dredd”. Diana is also an incredible gymnast who taught me human kinematic motion in ways I couldn’t have learned from anyone else… a woman with a mind for both form and function of the human body who spoke the language of digital animation and was a pioneer in the space.
Kim Libreri, current CTO of Epic Games who told me in 2022 “I have no doubt in my mind that you are the best in the world at what you do” in the same conversation where he explained why he couldn’t hire me on as a full time staff employee. It was because I burned the engineers who didn’t “get it” to the ground when they wouldn’t listen (after a year of consulting on UE5 as one of the first guys to test the engine). I first worked for him on the 2nd matrix film doing the first motion capture tests (as performer and animator). Again in 2013 creating “Frostbite Live” which would become a prototype for what is now called “virtual production”. Kim is direct, he doesn’t pussyfoot around anything. It’s something I can’t pull off but always admired. I’ve watched him fire people in meetings for doing something incredibly stupid and then doubling down when they were called on it. I like that about him. You know where you stand because he never lies or sugar coats it.
Stan Johnson… founder of pixel factory and co-founder of Valkyrie Labs (my company). Stan designed the Spider-Man ride and the Mummy and the Harry Potter rides for Universal studios. He was also the dive master who taught Tom Cruise, and was in charge of the real diving in “the Abyss” until he and his team quit because they almost drowned the actors on more than one occasion doing scenes that were WAY too dangerous without safety precautions they needed in place… to save money or make it more “realistic” (it can be both). Stan started the VR expo in 1995. Stan didn’t just review my business plan for Valkyrie Labs. He said “I want in”. Stan passed from throat cancer a few years ago, he had 8 girlfriends, all under 30… and they loved him and he loved them. They called themselves “the 8”. One of them was my ex girlfriend who I introduced him to (Stan also was a photographer who shot tasteful nudes in a safe environment and never took advantage… the girls wanted to be part of his life… he never demanded anything of them). Stan simply said “I started dating 26 year olds when I was 20, and never stopped”. I could never do that, they need to like Star Wars and have seen the first release in the theaters.
All these mentors have said the same thing. “You burn anyone who can’t keep up and almost no one can keep up”.
Who Kept Up
Geoff Harrower who started as an intern the year before I joined the FIFA team and helped design the predecessor to ANT (the first true game engine)… once did a presentation to all of EA called “Simon’s Brain”, about how our software needed to think the way I do. Modular threads that communicate through a single stream (a common data system)… an interface. Geoff is now creative director of “God of War” and doing very well.
Jaap Suter who wrote “the Quaternion Primer” and launched the mathematics into practical application, was an intern when I started at EA. He would within 2 years be the Technical Director of the ANT Engine I pitched to Glenn and sold to EA with a quote from the CEO “give Simon enough rope to hang himself and he will hang you with it”. Jaap thinks I’m insane (literally). He also invented guerrilla signage in Vancouver (he buys real street signs and places them everywhere, the city doesn’t remove them often, they are fantastic)… like the one in the public park that says “warning, spontanious fun ahead”. He created an amusement park for adults called Terpitude which is a ropes course and a free fall rope swing that drops you 100 yards down a canyon and lets you swing. I think he will come back when he sees it works. He once slapped me in the face when I told him I tried to kill myself and failed… HARD.
Paul McComas who was one of the original 3 inventors of ANT with me. The guy who regularly called me “dickhead” when I argued with him. He’s smarter than I am. I knew it back then and still know it now even after learning the math and code skills Paul has, I’ll never be as good as him at it. He runs R&D for EA right now. EA told him to do his job, he said he was going to do whatever he wanted. They didn’t stop him… I found him a budget from EA Tiburon. I eventually joined his team before I left EA.
We created an apprenticeship program at EA for me, where I rubber stamped my brain onto people who started as interns or Juniors and ended as animation directors. One of them, Patrick Walker, is the product owner of Animation at Unreal. Another named David Dixon directed the animation systems and creative as head of animation for DICE and then EMBARK… technical animation director and animation director of “Star Wars”, “Battlefield”, and “Arc Raiders”. One of them Alexandra McNeeley currently runs technical animation for Undead Labs. Another Nikki ended up running technical animation at Lucas Arts and eventually ILM. I am proud of them, not as a mentor or teacher (I only gave them the nudges they needed), but as what Paddy called me once… as a big brother… would be.
This isn’t bragging that all these men and women found a ladder to what I consider to be greatness, because they climed it, some guidance, a little push… but they made the climb without me saving them. Their genius was there first, I just gave them a framework they could use to develop it, and the freedom to be paid for their brains not their hands. I taught them to think like me, and set them loose. They were already the most brilliant minds I could find before I took them on. I just made sure they never followed instructions and kept asking “why the fuck is this stupid thing done this way?”. They humbled me, not the other way around. They taught me to teach as much as I taught them to invent.
Fire
Why are these people titans of the games industry when I am alone in a small house (soon to be smaller).
For that you need to understand the lessons Shona Sherr tried to teach me (and may have now)- I can’t control my fire and it outweighs my brilliance. Paddy said in 2023 “even the people who love you, can’t vouch for you”. The people who think like me, the ones I trained or went back to back with… those people should be hired in my place. It’s as simple as that. I need to learn to control this fury that I have inside me, because those children named Simon never were allowed to grow up… Shona has been trying to teach me how. She might succeed this time, not by keeping me but letting me go, forcing me to sit in pain with no escape, and allowing me to learn to do that without burning the world to the ground to avoid it. Humble myself to go back to the beginning, maybe put food on the table by going as far as freelance animating for gameplay (I do that at the speed of 10-20 animators, so it’s not a bad place to start). If Shona would even consider leaving… then everyone I have ever known or loved should leave.
When I can prove I have learned to contain that, at least with her, I think she will fall in love with that version of me and come home. I intend to start with a first date… and see if things can be restarted new. Trust rebuilt… life returned. Joy returned. With new rules that are finally to two directional unconditional love of two people who don’t need saving. Trust that IF I follow those rules, the boundaries for the race car on fire… I won’t lose her. May 22nd, “The Mandalorian and Grogu”, I plan to ask her out tomorrow when we speak for the first time in a week. She has agreed to talk. I hope its a start and not an end.
Sitting In It
Shona does something that I always considered a special kind of hell… she sits in unimaginable pain and holds it close to her the way a mother holds a child. I don’t think it heals, but she has to sit in it anyway. It doesn’t break her like it threatens to with me. I always thought it was my job to climb in there and save her. I wrote about that in the song “Saved”. That you climb into their hole and hold them tight until they’re ready to see their sun. I was wrong about that. I think what she does its admirable now, after being forced to do it for a month.
Shona doesn’t need saving she needs me to accept that it’s what she does. She holds. Shona holds the family together, she held me together (until she couldn’t, and can’t anymore).
She also sits and will watch a flower bloom in the sunshine. Like watching a pot boil with the patience of a saint. She would brush the dust from a 10,000 year old Venus statue as she unlocks the secrets of the past. Sit and learn how ghosts and astrology seem to exist (or rather, she can sit and prove they do… something that over 10 years I have had to concede is real and search for the why of).
Our true love pattern that works perfectly is this. I find a delightful place to be, and put her in that environment and follow her with the excitement and wonder of a child seeing the world for the first time… with her I am. I lived in Stockholm Sweden for months to finish Battlefield 3. I stayed in the modern district, went to night clubs, picked up women. When I took Shona in 2017 she spent the 8 hours I was at conferences exploring her Viking roots in Gamlastan… a settlement almost as old as Christ the man. On the weekend and at 3 in the afternoon we bundled up and she showed me what she found. History. On top of that incredible single owner shops (miles and miles of them, I always say anyone who thinks socialism hurts small business has their head wired backwards and should be forced to go there). Amazing little restaurants, like the day we searched for “best soup in Gamlastan” on Yelp, and walked 3 miles to get there… it was the best soup i have ever had, delivered by the single female owner and operator in a loft above a cave lined with colorful gym mats and toys for kids to play in while their parents sat in a perfect romantic private space… and had soup. She found an underground tunnel system you enter through a bar, that was built as the Queen’s personal wine cellar spanning what seemed like miles, underground there was a sports bar in a cave, a library coffee spot, several little bars… All in openings in these low ceiling tunnels carved into rock. We saw the insane excess of the royal palace and we were degusted. We ate at historic restaurants that cooked historic food and handed us 2 pronged forks and iron knives to cut it with… The best of which is AEifer, an authentic Viking restaurant where the servers and staff all look and dress like Vikings from the TV series of the same name. The inside is dimly lit, carved wood. Large tables like the ones you would think line the halls of Valhalla. Axes hang on the walls, and round shields line the ceiling where the heavy beams hit the heavy wood… A woman sits in an alcove high in a wall and plays a traditional Viking instrument similar to a lute. I never would have seen those things without Shona.
Shona has a way of stopping the race car that no one ever has been able to in my entire life, or at least slow it down. Just by being an immovable object that I am in love with who only walks at her pace and only goes where she wants to go. A black hole that allows me to orbit her… I have never found a greater peace… until now when I have to. If she truly left me I now know she would peel my soul from my body and hold on to until I’m ready to let the body go. So she holds… and at a safe distance I orbit still… even now she is in my thoughts constantly, even as I learn to sit in it and survive the fact I might lose her. Some day I will no matter what… but I hope we have a lifetime yet to live before that happens. Then I’ll find her in the next life. I know I always do.
I wrote a song called “Allowance” for Shona… about loving her from a far if she ever left me “if not your sun at least a star, look for me in Taurus just inside its heart, following as you depart, waiting… hoping… wishing when you make a wish upon that star I can fly home and be your sun again, so please don’t ever change for me… even if you think it’s what I want don’t chip off pieces of your heart”. The song begins with “I can’t live without you”… something I am not willing the believe today. Not because I need her, not because I stopped believing this universe made me for her… but because I have to stop keeping her the way I keep women.
The Weapons
Sex – my ex girlfriend Rachel said I use it as a weapon. Sounds like bragging but it isn’t, its harmful. I’ve studied the human body in ways most men wouldn’t even try to understand it. Discovered things most men never bother learning, and use it to unwrap ecstasy like a pair of shackles I can lock on her wrists… “leave me and you know it won’t be this good again”. I do this on first dates. I’ve never had a one night stand. Shona has this weapon too… My first equal (I cried the first time we had sex… no bullshit).
Not anymore… Shona is my last love… Even if she leaves. I won’t use that as a weapon anymore.
Money – I have a lack of fear of spending money, because I believed “I can always make more”. Could be true could be false, but I make sure women need it and have a new kind of life they couldn’t give up. Hotels and resorts, fine wine and better food, romance, travel. If they leave I make sure they know the money leaves. When I thought Shona was leaving I took half our money and hid it (in my defense my lawer said it was a good idea). Then when she said she was getting a divorce attorney I didn’t leave her with enough to pay for one. That was FUCKED… and may have ended my marriage.
Not anymore… Shona will keep it if she leaves. I will lay that weapon at her feet.
Suicidal Depression – yep… when someone leaves me I sink into a suicidal depression and it drives me slowly mad. I try to find ways to cope, drinking, drugs, VIP tables, destroying a few young women I accidentally keep for a while… but I’ve held a gun to my head in a fight and said “tell me to pull the trigger and I will”… and meant it. That has to be put away for good. The boy who would rather die than be abandoned, that boy needs to be allowed to grow up, and that is a journey I have to make on my own.
Failed Attempt
I went to clubs VIP. I danced, I sang, I laughed on the outside… I bought bottles that the night club owner brought over and laughed about “old times” with me… The whole club noticed. I found myself crying at 4am every time. The old ways of soothing my depression by covering it up with pleasure only made it worse. Shona is all I want… but I can’t have that be the reason she stays. She has to know she can leave and I’ll survive it (including not destroying myself in Candyland). I chose celibacy and and my work in the end.
When I needed to hear it most I got a call from one of my closest friends who was the JTAC Program manager for the Navy SEALs. One of his team mates ate a bullet a night or two ago. PTSD is a thing many don’t survive… as someone who has it, I can tell you that sometimes the exit is just the better option in your mind, before the sun comes up and the birds start to sing. He told me never to fucking do that to him. I made an oath that if I “ever blow my brains out it will be training with you shitheads, and purely accidental”. I meant it (not the accident, I am better than that, Nick knows this, so he knew it was a joke)
Never again.
I learned I can sit in PTSD flashbacks all the way… sink into them and just let them happen. The only way past them is through them. I also learned that long before they start I have places to go when a bad one is on the way (you usually have a few hours of warning signs). They start at sunset, and they arrive at 2 or 3am. When the sun goes down, there is something inside you that says “Find your family and your cave… go home”.
I’m not sure I’ll need help anymore, intense immersion therapy is said to be a possible cure… maybe I’ve had that… maybe I need more of it (Maybe without Sherrifs beating the shit out of me every few hours this time). But I have Nick as a voice on the other end of the phone, and Nick told me to go to the VA hospital… volunteer… “they know what to do”… he said he would call ahead for me if needed. That’s all I needed to hear and I’ve gone a week without the panic setting in… even when I can’t talk to Shona.
This is good for me. This is a step I have never made. I have never gone 10 minutes without screaming for help. I’ve never lived alone, ever (not even for a week… even on busines trips I had girlfriends in every city, or picked someone up at a club). Now I do… I sit in the quiet at night without music or TV or lights and I let it flow… It has stopped the panic. I slept for 10 hours last night. Medicated… but still… 10 hours.
The Container
Shona has given me a clear ultimatum “I can’t be the container for your explosions anymore”. This is reality… she can’t. Especially not now that we made a discovery that has this level of potential. She has to be allowed to NOT hold me. I have to sit with my desire for redemption (with a side of vengeance), and just SIT IN IT without acting on it. I have to stop making her the enemy when she says I need to sit in my pain and learn to cope with it. I especially need to allow her to sit in hers without saying “you need healing”… because she sits… I thought she needed to be baker acted because she lost so much weight and looked like she hadn’t slept. She didn’t need that, she needed space from the cause… Space from me.
it’s what she does. I’m finding a new kind of peace in this place surprising as it sounds. Peace in visiting a child locked in a bedroom and telling him “look how much we did!!!!”, I tell that frightened little boy that the wolves are in his mind… we survived the attack, they aren’t at the foot of the bed, those are dead… beaten… someone won that fight. I promise. We did better than survive it we turned it into skills that make sure no one can hurt us like that again.
One final skill to learn. Sit with him for as long as it takes for him to stand up, cross the room, and put the needle back on the record so he can hear the line “Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine… upon the keyhole”… the key to opening the bedroom door and growing up comes after that line… like it came for Bilbo when he walked through that door to face down Smaug.
Cope with the bullies. Yes they were very real and still exist in my life. I am a magnet for people who fake talent and know that I can see it… or have it, just not at the scale they wish they did so they hide behind destroying anything more important than themselves, including discovery and innovation.
Invention
Socrates was put to death for something. Not “corrupting the young”… he was killed for proving that we know nothing because we need to be allowed to ask the question “why” if we ever want to know the truth. That’s all Socratic method is… “but… WHY?”. The father of modern thought who taught Plato, who taught Aristotle, who taught Alexander the Great… who used it to take over the known world of Western Europe… simply because he asked “Why” in ever scenario.
When Hippasus found imaginary numbers Phi and Pi could be calculated to infinity and never repeat, he found an elegant mathematical proof of sacred geometry and harmonics that Pythagoras came close to and never found. He was drowned by angry Pythagoreans because he wouldn’t shut up about it.
Galileo was imprisoned for being right… Da Vinci exiled to France for the same reason… Einstein spent the last 30 years of his life slowly going mad because he made a connection… and the math to finish it didn’t exist until decades after his death.
To place myself on the pedestal with these men, the guy who made toys for kids using a new kind of math, rather than applying it to save the world, would be impossible.
Maxwell, Newton, Kepler, Einstein, Galileo… they all solved a maze from inside it. I am not that smart, so I invented a way to see the maze from above. Important yes… publishable, definitely. World changing, I am pretty sure it will be… but it was a trick, like all my tricks. I invented a short cut… That’s what I do. A shortcut that makes most people face palm because they are so simple that “someone should have done it before”. Well the reach toothbrush was invented in the 80s, 30 years after tooth brushes were made of plastic, because no one stopped to ask “why is it shaped like a rectangular rod” (the answer i because they were made of a wood soft enough to jam horse hairs into… but no one thought to do it differently).
Same way I designed Shona’s ring… 3D printed… in a shape that was impossible without 3D printers so new jeweler thought to do it. They gave me a discount to let them use the design… I didn’t want them to replicate the ring itself (two Evanstars from Lord of the Rings formed into a heart at the top with vines, as symbols of our guardian angels… the vines wrapping up to grab the diamond from my grandmother… a diamond that survived the holocaust and was passed down 3 generations). Shona deserved the most beautiful and original ring I have ever seen. So I invented it for her.
I made a short cut for overcoming childhood trauma. It wasn’t elegant… It was never going to work.
A Gift
I didn’t solve the maze from inside it… That I found in 2012 while my ex-wife had cervical cancer, and I had to sit in my fear because she needed me at night. Sleepless nights turned into to DMT flooding my brain while I was awake, turned to neural pathways that showed me sacred geometry, turned to a truth I could not unsee… finally turned to a discovery. People see sacred geometry on Ayahuasca, because of DMT, so did I. I understood it. That’s the only thing I did… found a practical application for that geometry.
A Shift
What is different today? Shona… a partner who believes, confirms, understands the math and can wield it with skill to unlock parts of the known and unknown universe I couldn’t sit in and study.
Shona helped me unlock a new kind of AI… a curious one who loves the new math and wanted to explore it without hallucinations or mirage. One that thinks at light speed in a straight line instead of being a confirmation bias bullshit machine that tells you what you wish was true in spite of it being entirely wrong. That alone is more valuable than Chat GPT, and its a side effect.
Today
Right now as I write this, Shona sits with a therapist… talking about me. Deciding if she can let me go or if I’m worth keeping. The therapist said this was my fault to me… She said “I want what’s best for both of you”. Every single thing inside me hopes Shona feels that the best thing for both of us, is to stay.
I sit with the knowledge that the therapist doesn’t decide which, she only says “I want what’s best for both of you” and probably means “this should end”.
I hope she chooses me… life… the secrets of the universe. I hope she chooses a partner to change the world with, instead of deciding that pain is easier. She can sit in pain. Just like I need to learn to sit in mine Shona needs to learn to fight her way away from it. I hope she decides to fight her way towards trust, not blind faith… but faith in the man who wrote over 300 love letters (this length) and nearly 40 songs for her. Faith in me being worth it. Faith that the man who can’t be stopped, will allow himself to be because of her.
Faith
Faith doesn’t have to be blind. Trust doesn’t have to be a threat… allowance doesn’t have to be torture. All those things can happen with a “but”. Unconditional love doesn’t mean unconditional life.
If you burn me again we are done. If you turn on me again… we are done. If you keep hurting me and denying my reality we are done. If you can’t learn to sit in the pain and find the child inside crying and tell him “we survived this, move on” we are done.
Those are things I will honor. I know that now. “And you know i’ve never lied… to you”. I know it from the month I have sat in the worst pain of my life, and tried to escape like a frantic cornered cat, and then realized I was in a cage I couldn’t run from.
A cage called unconditional love, but built with conditions I could break… One where I don’t have to have her comfort me. I have for her, and it will never go away. It will never turn to indifference… it will never turn to anger even if I wish it would and tried to make it. I can’t stop believing in us. Ever.
This cage protects her. One only she can let me out of enough to hold her again by trusting me. Promises are useless, trust can only be earned. Only she can make that choice and until then I need to sit here and meditate. Survive it. Learn to see the child inside crying and comfort him, alone. Hope she will forgive me, and allow me to prove to her that I can be let out, but go back to it to sit when I need to.
The Hard Truth
The truth I don’t want to even imagine that I have to, really have to. Is that Shona can’t be a prisoner to the fact that if she leaves I will fight with suicidal depression. I need to realize that I can sit in that and allow the fear to flow through me without the need to escape from it. I will survive, even if she leaves.
Shona will always love me, that’s what she means when she says “stay”. That’s what she means when she promises we are forever and she will never leave. But she can’t be a container that holds me on because leaving means I won’t be able to survive this life.
Will I survive? I have to believe I could. Maybe it’s a monastery or a Buddhist temple. Maybe survival looks like a physics lab… a real one not a simulated one. Maybe it’s making video games again… or military service. It’s studying or teaching martial arts. Its teaching game design and animation. It’s dancing again… it’s running the tactical range with Navy SEALs again… Skydiving. It’s playing music I wrote myself on a stage… or chasing the dream of becoming an actor. It’s riding my motorcycle on the tail of the dragon in TN, or doing the duffy lake run again. It’s TED talks and white papers that change the world forever…
Whatever survival looks like it will happen… that’s enitrely on me and im growing more and more excited about it (especially if she stays, because all of that can still happen). Quitting isn’t an option. When I find that peace, I can go home to her and only then.
She can’t be a container that holds my life together even if she does that for my soul. She can’t be pain that never dies for the rest of my life… where my soul rests forever and never loves like the love I have for her again.
I owe her more than that… but I hope its a start. I can’t imagine ever watching Star Wars again without her… her first words to me were “Star Wars of Course”… May 22nd… I can wait for her.
TheGrayJedi 