When the Wolf Leads

[whenthewolfleads]

Update:

You were a fucking asshole.

I was right.

[whenthewolfleads]

Before Therapy

If it ever happens...

I’m afraid you’re using me.

I’m paranoid you set up situations.

Secretly, I repulse you.  I’m something to fill in your time when you feel terrible.  Bored.  Needing to fulfill a dream of paternal bliss where you’ll dispose of me after you get your spawn.  

I’m afraid your kindness is that of a psychopath:

calculating, fake, methodic, nefarious.

Simply because,

without prompting,

you lovingly fit your hand against the back of my head.

I have such ugly, self-defeating, ridiculous, unfair, troubling, judgmental, damaging, poisonous thoughts about 95% of the people in my life, 100% of anyone that I’ve ever shared intimacy with.  

I don’t understand how you can look at me with such clarity and purity.  And care.  How can you look at me the way that you do as if I created the moon?

How do you fold into me so easily with such trust and abandonment of every moment before and after we existed in the same space?

Simply because.

[whenthewolfleads]

To You

My insecurities are coming out.  I can feel it and see it happening in the way I move and I currently can't stop it.

I don't believe you right now.

I don't believe that you find me attractive.  I don't believe that you actually love me or that you're mistaking yourself.  I don't believe any of it.

I expect to wake up one day and the sentiments and kind words stop.

I expect you to become annoyed, distant, angry with me over everything, secretive, histrionic, manipulative, unfair, judgmental.  An antisocial mastermind that chose me to fuck with and laugh at.  

I'm trying to challenge myself and shape this as a sign that I'm allowing greater vulnerability and risk with you rather than assuming that I'm picking up on something that I need to listen to.

I don't want to put it on you.  I want to be honest about my thinking and where I'm coming from, although I've learned to control it much more and manage the obsessive thoughts.  Yet, I feel like there isn't a point-- I'll sound nuts or dramatic as it's coming out of my mouth.  It feels very real on the inside, though.  I still feel very much like a six year old without the capacity to process all of it.

I want to believe you.  In spite of how much dishonesty, cheating, and selfishness I've seen and been a part of, I want to believe you now, five years from now, twenty years from now.

You’ll leave.

I want to believe that you can and will still look at me the way that I will with you.  I was capable of it, even in my worst relationships.  I want to believe it.   Right now, it's hard.  I'm afraid it'll push you away so that I don't discover how you may hurt me on my own.  Know that everything that I say, feel, and do is 100% genuine-- not done as a bid to keep you close or seek assurances and reinforcement.  It's all real.  

You won't see me, anymore.  You’ll think I lied to you.

I wake up with that mental cancer, every day.  It just grew louder when I knew you were the real thing.

I don't know what to do about it at the moment.  I may in a bit.  It’ll fall back.  It will dissipate, again.  

The more you know, the more you’ll be okay with leaving.

I’m not who you think I am.  

I’m not sure what to do with all of this right now.  It’s been easier to hold myself in and make it all about other people.  

It’s a matter of time.  You’ll figure it out and so will your family.  Please just end it.

I’m sorry.  I’m trying.

[whenthewolfleads]

10:59pm

The prospect of being alone hit me even more in the last few days.

 I didn’t think he was a forever partner, although I was willing to try.  I thought he would’ve been the perfect person to understand and even celebrate those darker layers of me that I have yet to partition and integrate.  

He invited me to open up.  Agreed to be more thoughtful.  Enthusiastically shared that he wanted to be ‘my rock’ and contend with the fire lit beneath his heart.  

I ended up getting roasted.  Again.  He didn’t respond.  Again.  I understand my father so much more.  Again.

“It’s because you’re strong, it seems like you don’t need anyone.  They're intimidated.  They’re douches and they can’t handle it...”

...says the man who was one of those exact people towards me.  

I’m overwhelmed with self-pity.  Fixated on the insidious, passive rejection with without a known or offered reason. Still with decades ahead of me and stuck in an extended frame of loneliness in a movie I can’t seem to keep moving forward.

Always rewinding.  Always pausing.  Always painstakingly drawing and pouring over grossly pixelated details.  

I can’t cry.  I can’t even write the way that I want.  I feel stuck again in that pit.  

I do feel angry that it’s still there, that everything I feel always feels amplified.  It’s like in a dream when you’ve discovered the power of flight, access an ethereal, fantastical dimension of life, able to manipulate the environment.  Then, once that power is realized, you’re suddenly taken back to earth and unable to lift off the ground again.  The light stops pouring from your hands.  The lucidity keeps everything fastened to the earth.  The dream becomes apparent and the simple awareness robs you of the key to a different life.

Every relationship is one dream after another, too painfully aware, unable to wake, and watching myself fall back down to earth every single time.

I always...ALWAYS took a running leap, and every so often, I got back off the ground, but not for long.

This time, I feel like sitting.  I don't think I ever saw anyone else above or below me when I was soaring.  Maybe everyone else figured it out.

I’ll stay on the ground.  Maybe, once I become aware of that, it’ll end.  Or maybe the earth will give way.

Sometimes falling feels like flying.  Perhaps, that’s all it was this whole time.

[whenthewolfleads]

Your title is too fat

I don’t feel like a real woman.

Or even a real person.

Not perky enough.

Too strong for a woman, not strong enough for in-between.

Not feminine enough.

Not passive, submissive, tolerant enough.

Hair isn’t thick enough, nose isn’t small and dainty, shoulders and back broad enough to inspire an embarrassing conversation by strangers in public.

I tell myself that it’s okay to be strong. That it’s okay to not “act” like a woman, whatever the fuck that means. That it’s okay that my voice isn’t as soft and high-pitched, but soothing and capable of bringing the distressed back down to earth.

That it’s okay to have stick straight, fine hair...a storm without wind.

I tell myself this, but I don’t feel it.

And I don’t believe that anyone could be genuinely attracted to me and appreciate everything that I hate about myself. I don’t believe that someone probably won’t even notice them.

Not enough to be a woman

and yet I already exist with so much less.

I feel like an awkward, misshapen rock floating along the outer belt, crashing and disrupting the orbits that formed without me.

A giant space-potato.

A sulking, lumpy, thin-haired, stocky, breakin-up-the-party space-potato.

A real fuckin feminine analogy there...

[whenthewolfleads]

“...or, I could just wash your hair.”

There’s constant conflict about my ‘self.’  I’m always tapped into both parts and feel there a way to make them meet, but the instructions seem very convoluted. I keep telling myself in a cliched, new-age way to ‘let it happen,’ but there’s a nexus I can't access.  It’s there-- a veritable crux I have to untangle-- and I can’t figure out what’s worse: that I have to wade through so much to get to it or that I will be placed in front of an existential Rubik’s cube.  I’ve never made it past connecting a single row.  

I’m getting tossed up and around a lot, lately.  The events aren’t even that prolific and probably a typical weekend for most in their 20′s and 30′s.  For me, it’s been a schizophrenic break and re-integration.  The glue starts to set, then some other nefarious situation intrudes into my blueprint of the human experience and takes a giant fucking dump all over it.  Then, pours its still-hot coffee right on top and leaves a steaming pile of wicked waste.

So what do I do?  Put my hands into it and start molding.  I can make some pretty awesome castles...but it’s still made of shit.  Me, legs braided, crossing the delta of Neanderthal and modern-day man, and turning fecal waste into a pantheon of denial.  

But look, I made a covered bridge.  And a mote for my past to piss in.  

I was pulled into a crowd that would have surely rejected me growing up.  I made conversation over the lack of progressive quality of an Oktoberfest mug while pondering ecstasy and a young girl that I’m sure wanted me to fuck her face while her partner watched.  Every bad decision I ever made in the past teamed up with every bad decision I could have taken and seemed prepared to make an untenable push to create a reprise of 1999 to 2013.  

Oh, sure.  I snuck home, made some excuse about a girlfriend needing me because of her mother’s cancer diagnosis (true) and she was at my place coming apart (not true).  Yes.  I was definitely escaping a potentially rough situation and saving the clean-up of a cataclysmic assault on my morality...only to be propositioned by my landlord.  I appreciated the enticement of Japanese whiskey and some impressive backstory about a urine-toned elixir. I remember that whiskey.  I was sitting at a favorite local watering hole where even the new servers already knew my name and escaped into a fantasy of how my then-partner’s visit would be around that bottle of Suntory.  It was a wonderful moment, at least in my head-- and now I can’t bring myself to confront the insidious, downward spiral that seemed to begin the moment I decided to check in on him.  But, I digress.

It was comical hearing my beer cap pop off and dance on the ground for what seemed far too long-- almost like the universe needed to punctuate the deafening silence I forbid myself to puncture as he promised me pleasure like I’ve never felt.  

“...or, I could just wash your hair.  Whatever you want.”

Are you sure?  I mean, come on bud-- a burger and a beer with a dog lovingly at your feet and the dishes already done is pretty fucking monumental.  And the ring around the toilet was finally decimated.  And my pants still fit, despite a meltdown over a plate of garlic fries and too many old fashions the night before.  Chubs for days.  

I felt so fucking lonely that I told myself everything he said about being estranged and intimately disconnected from his wife was true.  He didn’t exactly seem broken, but I filled in the spaces of time with the conversations I needed in order to convince me that this sort of experience will be needed for the sake of growth.  

I said no, remembering all of the uncoordinated, unfinished, unclean, ill-placed items in my home.  I expected him to carefully note every hole in the wall I hadn’t yet vigorously finger-fucked with spackle.  

I wish I said no because my integrity and spirit demanded it, unequivocally.  Because, I don’t want to be that woman that every woman hates, even if they did it, too.  Because I didn't want the painful reminder that it truly means nothing, no matter how much I tell myself that this is a chance to reclaim my sexuality and honor the inherent selfishness of satisfaction and physical liberation.  That and I can count one time when I truly got off just because an ex happened to discover the right spot for about four seconds.  We fought shortly after that.  

No.  I would have rather finger-fucked myself with spackle and plugged that shit up to save me from myself.  

That’s how I’ve lived-- waiting for everything to happen, then keeping it outside the door until I think every trinket and moment was in its right place.  A museum of snapshots.  That won’t ever happen and it shouldn’t.  

He’s supposed to return in a few weeks and gave me the grace of contemplation in order to decide if it was something I still wanted and would find some value in.  I don’t know what will happen or if I’ll make what I know to be the right decision in that moment.  

If it takes a potential lover being in my home in order for me to get a decent comforter and arrange for cohesiveness to breathe over the tokens of passing years, so be it.  I’ll just keep him outside the door once he arrives.

[whenthewolfleads]

I come in pieces.

You know that painful, tickled feeling that happens when your foot or leg fall asleep and the blood starts to rush back?  A part of you slightly enjoys and slightly shifts to get that rush, but it’s also incredibly uncomfortable and restricting?

That’s how I imagine happiness to be.  I keep getting flooded with what feels like happiness-- I don’t know.  It happens consistently enough.  I panic because I wonder if it’s some sort of mild bi-polar event...being suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude, motivation, authenticity...and an urge to tell the whole world about it.  

I know and understand contentment, both as a strategy against stress and a genuine state.  

I’ve done a very good job of familiarizing with the spectrum of every dynamic, existential state.  But no one explained to me what happiness feels like.  It feels both incredibly threatening and it’s not yet safe for me to move with it.  I just sit with this schizophrenic state of rejecting and wanting it.  

I can talk about the bad all day.  I can be very matter of fact...very Gestalt.  Very adamant and indignant about self-responsibility.  “The universe doesn’t give a shit about you or your feelings...” and there’s a real freedom in that.  

But man...I don’t know how to talk about being happy.  It’s an alien in the room that I’m not sure yet if I’m attracted to or want to stay.

I guess we’ll just stare at each other for awhile.

[whenthewolfleads]

I never thought that one international trip could make such a huge difference.

[whenthewolfleads]

Do we need to burn?

What would be left of me if I couldn’t run anymore? Or lost my sight. Couldn’t speak. Suffered a brain injury. A total loss where I have to confront my character and how I’ve spent my time giving love, building others up, offering support. What would be remembered and appreciated when what I and all of us value on the outside is stripped?

Am I as passionate about the health of my spirit and morality as I am my body?

What happened that I feel the need to examine that?

[whenthewolfleads]

Another long shitty coming of age blog...

…at 32…

But for whatever reason, that seems to be exactly what needs to happen.  Or, what I feel needs to happen.

I have thrown away every journal I’ve ever written in.  Ripped out pages moments or days later.  Looked at the words with disgust because I didn’t feel authentic.  For someone that totes not giving a shit, I give so much shit that it explains why I feel like it so much, sometimes.  I think I always expected someone to find it or read it and it changed the lens in which I viewed myself and the world.

I guess I need to look at this differently.  I expect the people that I work with to have a propensity for vulnerability.  I expect risk-taking.  I get to witness their growth and their regression.  Why I don’t demand as much, if not more of myself is beyond me.  Maybe the possibility of one or a million people witnessing my own depth will cause me to take more accountability.  Even if there isn’t a single one, the implication is enough.

It’s not about being 32.  It’s about the two year old, the six year old, the ten, fifteen, 25, a-day-ago entity layered upon each other that needs to integrate it all together.  And fucking accountability.  I minimize and rationalize way too much and pick apart the details that suit me in order to feel better about not following through or surpassing.  

I started a goal this year to make myself as uncomfortable as possible.  Ironically, I think I’ve done really well with that goal and literally started at 1pm, January 1st.  On the surface, it was overcoming the general discomfort of 38 degree water with a couple hundred other people.  A mile below, it was about battling severe anxiety and fear– including a fear of suddenly dying.  What a way to begin to mindfully begin to tell my mother to fuck off.  And perky tits.  Not the point, but that was a pleasant, brief benefit.  My only regret occurred during a post-swim spontaneous local news interview where I didn’t respond with  “so I could maybe feel something” when asked why I did it.  

Well, fuck me, the dark humor all these months later is unbearably true.  It’s messages all over the place guiding to these areas I’ve never been to that feel like home.  All these pulls to stress my body out as much as possible, to meditate, to disconnect, to wander, to restrain in order to indulge, to channel all that Jungian bullshit and meet the shadow parts.  It is, after all, what we seek when the light is too much.

So what does that all look like?  What are the odd messages? What have I been hearing for years?  How do I separate these ideas from the spirit of defiance that seems to enjoy self-punishment?  

Cover myself with tattoos.  Poke some more holes.  Run mountains.  Be alone.  Starve.  Fall asleep outside.  Surround myself with dogs and heavy music.  Play it.  Suspend thought.  Cry.  Beat the shit out of something.  Teach.  Suffer great loss.  Remain silent.  Continue devotion to public service.  Fire.  A home.  Acceptance.  Contact.  Breakdown.  Love.

A sublimation of all of that suicidal and dysphoric energy for years and reframing it into a cry for authenticity and meaningful stress.  Not martyrdom.  Targeting discomfort seems to be creating the holding space I need, but I have to keep going.

I don’t know what it’s towards.  I just know what the intention and journey prevents where I came from.  I’m no longer seeking an answer.  It would imply an end for me.  

I, like anyone else, and meant to be a blend of the absolute best and absolute worst of the human experience.  I’m meant to accept and appreciate those insidious nightmares as much as I do the moments that remind me that I’m okay.  But I have to be honest about them when they’re there, even if I fear that it will destroy me.  I can accept that part still wanting to die while overlooking a beautiful Honduran landscape or in Patagonia and feel equally as deserving to live.

So, here it is.  I’m going to talk to myself and work through everything from the meaning of some innocuous event to some brutally honest realizations and experiences– most of which I hope to induce.  

I’m meant to kick my own ass; for once, it doesn’t feel like for reasons of punishment and shame.  What a gift…

Yeah.  I do give a shit.  Many shits.