Therapy
Anyone who tells you “Hell is probably not the best place for therapy” – I would challenge them to visit it sometime. I don’t mean like a tourist. Don’t just pop in during a layover in pergatory… stroll through… and grab a demon or two to keep forever as a souvenier, the way most of us do in childhood.
I mean head on down and rent an apartment. Take your time. Stroll around… stop and smell the sulfer… Book a few appointments for some hot pokers up the rear. There is something about finding rock bottom, and then just digging, and digging, and finding a crack in the bedrock, and falling into flames, every time saying “well… I mean… It can’t get any worse right?”. Finally just ending up in a therapists chair staring Lucifer in the face and crying about every single thing you have ever done that got you to exactly where you are.
The Devil doesn’t start the first session with “tell me about your mother”… because he knows it’s bullshit. He just hands you a mirror and won’t let you look away when the demon inside you looks back and starts telling you the truth.
They say the door to hell is always open… That we are held there by our guilt. Yep. I can see that. But there is something else that holds us there sometimes to. Our convictions. Call it sickness or call it strength. I always said I preferred the latter. I always said I would only want someone who prefers the latter. Mine are that I can solve any problem, save everyone, and always… always… if it’s someone I love… FIX IT.
But what I am learning the hard way is that there is a reason you are called a convict when you are held in a place against your will, and maybe that “free will”, is the only thing that can help you see that sometimes your conviction is the road to hell not security. Free will is opening the door and walking away from those convictions and finding your way home in exactly the direction you are most afraid to go – towards the fear.
“I can’t fix it”
“not everything has a solution”
“I can’t save everyone”
The Tears For Myself
I am not going to pretend to “be a man” or “put on my big boy pants”. I know I can walk out this door and hit my wooden dummy so hard it tips over, and I know that if anyone wants a fight – it’s gonna hurt a lot even if they win. But Force, strength, dominating… That isn’t the measure of “being a man”… That’s what “Alpha Males” claim when they beat up someone half their size – like that’s some kind of “strength”.
Today being a man… Is crying. Not a tear slowly sliding down my cheek.. Crying… but it’s not that I AM crying, it’s literally figuring out why – the connection between all the triggers that made little sense this week.
Sunday + Monday + Tuesday, those were tears for myself. Selfish..”How can she just stop loving me”. That was her saying “I know Love, I’ll be there for your surgery, I would need you too if it was me”… and the next morning at 5am shifting, saying “I wasn’t safe “It isn’t safe… you aren’t safe”. What broke me wasn’t the “no”… What broke me was the “I know love,”… That for the first time in over a month, was her on a horizon. Didn’t matter how rough the road was from that moment – there was a road… Didn’t matter how hard I had to work to get there, there was a path – thorns, fire, mountains, armies… NOTHING would stop me from getting to her. Then it went away because “you… aren’t… safe”.
Fate
I cried for hours on my mothers shoulder. Like a child. Real crying. Hours. Because Shona is my soul mate. We have said it since the moment we met “There you are” – recognition. Nothing could end that, no experiences in this life can undo infinite time and thousands of lives trying to find each other in every single one of them. Forgiveness for mistakes, have to happen… I always thought that if I fucked up – there would be a space to find my way home… because we don’t just have some fantasy that we have had these lives, we have proven we have. We don’t just think the universe put us together, the universe proved it, over and over… so much so that I HAD TO believe in Magic and I can never stop believing in it. When something starts to work 100% of the time… You can’t just say “it’s a coincidence”. The true word for it is fate… FOREVER is our fate. That is why I cried Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. Because if it isn’t fate then then I am in hell trapped by demons who are keeping me away from the universe. An enemy… of my goddess… keeping me from her.
The New Tears
Wednesday we went to Wal-Mart and I cried in the towel isle because they were $10 “too expensive” I thought to myself. Then “Why the f#$k am I crying in the towel isle?”… so confusing.
That night I walked into the kitchen and started making food. A good meal… Steaks my mother paid for. I started to have a panic attack preparing food. I had no idea why, it was just a panic attack out of nowhere. It has happens almost every time I started to cook since. But I couldn’t figure out why.
Sunset still comes, and the panic i’ve had since this whole thing started still comes with it… but it feels completely different this week.
At first it felt like self-preservation “find home, find family… or you will die”. That was before I felt safe alone with the horrible voices in my head. Not real ones… not like “call a psychiatrist” ‘voices’. Just that inner monologue that hates you, and tells you all your worst fears are true when the lights are out and there is no sound to drown it out… Those horrible voices I have had for as long as I can remember. They are barely a whisper now.
I have never been able to sit in silence, in my life… Now I am doing it on purpose every day. Right now the only sound is the clicking of my keyboard. That would have made me have a full on panic attack, at 3am… maybe ending in a PTSD flashback.
But this week. The tears come, the panic comes… At very strange times. Last night at sunset I went outside and hit the dummy because that is where I put the panic (a knee scooter and some fists). I have never hit it as hard as I did last night, ever. I felt the most Ch’i I have ever felt exploding through me. My fists felt nothing, my forearms felt nothing no matter how hard they clashed with the arms. I didn’t get winded no matter how many times I repeated the form. I never heard the dummy sound like it might crack before… It felt powerful, like a shift in the universe… It took me until around noon today to figure out why.
The Shift
So what changed? To be honest without hyperbole of any kind. I have in every literal sense, lived every worst nightmare I have ever had. Directly lived them all, in the last two months. (I won’t keep beating a dead horse by repeating it here, and its a very long list and it checked every box – other than being eaten by a bear). Surviving that has helped me a lot… Not hurt me, not caused unrecoverable trauma -> HELPED… Immersion Therapy some might call it… “Winning a fight” others might call it.
At noon today I went into the kitchen to get lunch and I felt the panic. But the panic finally tapped through the armor and hit the source… I am worried about Shona and my children. All the triggers of the last few days suddenly fell into place like a game of tetris.
What started as “Go home or you will die” – became “Go home and protect them from the wolves tonight”.
Preparing food became “Feed them”
Working at my desk became “Provide for them”
Shopping became “Don’t take money from them”
Hitting the wooden dummy harder than I have ever hit it, harder than I ever imagined I could hit it without breaking every bone in my hands and arms… Turned into “Be invincible for them”.
When I go to bed, the pain says “She is still in pain, you can’t even comfort her”…
The Other Side of The Fists
Then the reality hits. With all of this… 10 years of protecting, providing, feeding, caring for her heart and soul. Mistakes sure… Moments of weakness of course… Pobody’s Nerfect…
But poetry written every day, and songs to ease her worries and sooth her spirit and make sure she sees that every single day she is alive she is the center of my universe… Staycations and laughter. “Deadpooling” for her… Dancing for her… Playing music for her… Gone… Slate wiped clean in a puff of smoke like none of it mattered… the fear of being on the other side of the fists became so great that the rest didn’t matter.
I don’t think she believes physically… She has watched me many times walk away from fights I could win with guys who deserved to be unconscious for the shit coming out of their faces… I don’t physically hurt people, I don’t… But emotionally being on the other side of the fire that I couldnt even find the source of in order to put out… Outweighs all of the rest I have to give. Dedicating everything I have for every waking minute, is not enough to make it worth keeping me…
I spoke to a close friend about this last night. One I burned in 2020 when I started Valkyrie Labs and we went from “brothers” to barely talking. Last night we talked for an hour about exactly that. “Being on the other side of our fists”. He, like me, is a lifelong martial artists – incredibly good… He also is a fellow Yang Dragon. He was born in the year of the Yang Earth Dragon who absolutely lives that persona and we used to call him “Baby Dragon” (I am Yang Fire Dragon). He like me is also very afraid of what happens when the Dragon comes out. Its a trait (not an excuse by any stretch, just a trait in the zodiac mythology) that the dragon is slow to anger, but when he reaches it he will destroy the world while he is standing in it.
When I met him he was in a horrific break-up and terrible depression and we became quite close because I had experience with what he was going through – a break up due to infidelity. Started working out together almost every day, which included hitting the heavy bag together (it would be a good fight… and I don’t say that about a lot of people). Through that time he went through so many emotions and all the stages of grief. But here is the thing… He got back together with her and then married her. They got back together and at first I hated her just for existing as the source of the pain my closest friend had worked through and was healing from. However, with sudden bursts of amazement I realized I really liked her. I stood next to him when he said “I do” and I was happy for him.
She is BRUTAL… I mean, “will burn you to the ground” just ’cause she speaks truth without any candy coating of filter – I love that in people. Last night we talked about how the very power that allowed her to cheat is exactly what he loves the most about her. Her strength, free will, agency… “You always know where you stand”. I understood that because I feel exactly the same about Shona.
I mean TODAY in HELL as I write this with Satan peering at me over his Freud glasses while I write this. I literally chose her for that reason, and in the last 10 years it has been the thing I love most about her and still love the most about her.
You can’t break her like a horse. She will never “just give up” or “just give in”… The thing about that is, it means that’s how her love works too. It will always be how her love works. She will never give up or give in. But “The other side of my fists” – the emotional side – she can’t call me home anymore. I hope that changes… Actions not words though.
Unstopable Force / Immovable Object… Locked right here… I have caved, I have fallen, I have been to hell (and I am waiting there), I have begged for mercy. But the very reason I fell in love with her, is the very reason that I have almost no hope. Shona – doesn’t back down. Doesn’t retreat… Doesn’t surrender… Doesn’t forgive people who are a threat to her or her family. Doesn’t allow them back in her life when they have shown they could hurt her, try to control her, or take away her agency and autonomy. I am on that side of her fists now… and I have never seen her put them down.
The Reality
So I cry. I am not ever going to fight her. I am not going to steal her strength or her autonomy (literally that is impossible, if you know Shona you know that is impossible). I am not ever going to stop protecting her because it’s not in my DNA, and because I will never forget the love, the real love that no matter how hard either of us tries is never going to be erased or replaced…
As I said in “Foundation” and as I said in my blog yesterday… She… CAN’T BE… Contained or controlled, and the hardest part is “I wouldn’t have her if she could”. I didn’t choose her profile because it was sweet, I chose it because it was BRUTAL “I’m not your mommy, I’m not your nurse, I am not an appliance”… I turned her Match.com profile into a song.
I chose her because of that. I still would, still do… And yes – She is still every single raindrop in my god damn raging storm… As the thunder cracks across the sky and the rain starts to pour down as I write this.
I don’t want her broken and conceding and coming home because she is afraid of what life without me is, life without the money and security it brings. I want her set free, and coming back because she sees me there… the man who cries when he cooks food because every single piece of his soul wants to make sure she, and my children… are fed.
There is a quote that jumped into my mind here at the end, as the rain stops and the sky is threatening to shine again… “What is sacred? Of what is the soul made? What is worth living for? What is worth dying for? – The answer to all of these is the same… Only love”
The tears I cry today… when all sense of self-preservation is gone and you cross that threshold of knowing “the easy way out is forgetting everyone you love matters more” — That’s where you feel only God’s love — It’s what is left begind when every ounce of hope is lost and you have no one to save you. THAT is what being “Saved” feels like. It feels like love… and holy shit… it hurts like hell. Especially when your connection to god, is sitting on a back porch, afraid of you coming home.
I hope Lucifer takes my insurance… I might be here a while.
TheGrayJedi 