Hey, Little Trouble

Yesterday was pretty rough. I burned myself pretty badly emotionally, thinking about the day I moved out from the house, and after I dropped off Whit last night, I couldn’t bear to look in the windows as I went back down the driveway and by the time I reached the end, tears were streaming down my cheeks. Again, Peter wants to go home, and again, I tell him not only that we can’t, but that we don’t really want to, that things are better for everyone now.

Home, I tell him gently, has to exist within before it can exist without. I remind him how home didn’t feel like home the last few months as things fell apart, as I fell apart. He was there, I think. I was still denying his existence at the time, keeping him buried in the basement, but I think he was there. Home is a place where you can feel comfortable within your own skin, but first we have to learn how to do that.

At least the sadness is grief, not shame. Maybe that’s why I want to write so badly right now because it will facilitate the grief. I don’t know. I have emotional interoception issues the same way I have physical ones. Yes, there is a feeling, but what does it mean? How do I respond to it? I thought my appetite was finally returning to a normal state yesterday when I felt actual hunger for the first time in a long time, but then I ended up being hungry all day, so something was wrong there. One day, I’ll figure out eating, and another day I’ll figure out crying.

I’m tired of grieving. I feel like I’ve grieved enough, and when I look to see where the sadness is coming from, it feels like this grief is only the tip of the iceberg. The grief over 1982 came as a surprise as I was recalling what had been a fond period of childhood only to find a shadow had fallen over it. Probing deep showed the shadow had been there all the time. I don’t feel like I have adequately grieved my twenty year marriage, my relationship to someone who was the most important person to me. Next to grieving for my mother, it seems like the most monstrous thing to ask me to do, to go and cry about the most amazing thing to ever happen to me, easily the happiest years of my life. Maybe I’m scared to find the shadow there as well.

I’m still writing. I haven’t really played a game in a week, I’ve just been writing. I’m reasonably on top of things right now, and so there’s plenty of free, open time, time I had been filling by binging different games. I had even freed myself from the lingering shame of spending my free time playing video games instead of doing something more productive, a particular virulent strain of self-flagellation that my mother planted in me early on. Playing games for hours was my source of autistic joy, where I could let the exterior world melt away to be replaced by a simpler, easier world where I had mastery.

I had even recovered my all time comfort game, my thousand hour game, and was happily playing that, when all of a sudden I stopped and started writing. Even if I didn’t know what I wanted to say, I wanted to sit at the keyboard and at least type, and I’ve been doing this for so long that eventually the writing just starts. At first it felt good. If I know anything about myself, it’s that I am a writer. I am an artist, and words are my medium. I write like other people breathe. And as I came back to writing, I had my hopes and my doubts.

I am scared about my voice. My writing voice was the glue I used to stick the mask on daily. I don’t trust my voice anymore. But there are things that I want to write about, things I want to share. I am filled with a need to communicate, to reach out, and at the same time filled with a fear of being seen, of being too loud, too boisterous, of being seen as stupid or ignorant, most of all being seen as bad. Again, it all comes down to my parents' legacy, a deeply rooted sense of shame and self-hatred. Maybe by connecting with another person, I can start to undo that, because it has been really difficult doing solo on my end.

After a couple of days of furious writing and finding nothing but pain, I started to feel like maybe I should back off a little. If I wanted to write, I’ve got all of these little story ideas scribbled around the margins. I should just grab one and pulp out a book. I used to write fiction. I finally wrote a novel, pushed myself to get it done, and I haven’t really written fiction since. And I found I couldn’t really get started, that I wasn’t really interested in fiction, I was interested in digging, and despite being cautious I stepped on a painful memory yesterday, perhaps the most painful of the past few years.

Maybe the whole point is to get me to cry. Even when I get overwhelmed by the sadness and burst into tears, those tears only last a short while, twenty, thirty seconds at the most, and then I’m just wiping my eyes and blowing my nose. I hate crying. I feel like such a mess. It’s painful and awful and I don’t understand why I’m doing it, what good it’s going to do. No mother is going to run and pull you out of that crib. It’s never happening.

I thought that might be it after that painful memory. I thought that might cure me of this overwhelming urge to spend my free time writing, but within an hour, I was back at the keys. Later when I was sitting in car line waiting for school pick up, I pulled out my notebook instead of the GameBoy. Here I am right now, spending these early morning hours jotting this down, trying to find a truer sound, trying to figure out what the hell happened, what is happening now. I write. It’s what I do.

The grief is running separate from the writing. The writing is only tapping into what’s going on internally. Last night I wasn’t writing, I was bouncing around the apartment while eating an orange, in a relatively good mood, when suddenly the song “Little Trouble” started playing in my head, and at first there was happiness, because I love the song, but it quickly turned to sadness because it was the song for my relationship last year, my first and only post-marriage relationship, a friendship that briefly blossomed back into something like its former self before flaming out suddenly and unexpectedly. And while losing that relationship hurt what hurt more was losing the friendship. A person who had been connecting with me daily through this whole period where I left my wife, my kids, my house, my cat behind and had to start again. Through it all this friend was there daily, hourly. I would wake up in the morning and have texts and emails to read because they had wanted to talk to me through the night. I had a custom ringtone for their texts that I heard more often than the normal text tone.

And then they fell silent. For months afterwards, I would hear phantoms of that ringtone. It took a long time before I would stop reaching for the phone to check to see if they had indeed reached out to me. And that was like a year ago. And then last night the song starts playing in my head, and I’m grieving again. There’s just so much. I don’t know where to start, I don’t know how to hold it all, and it slips through my fingers. And once again I find myself here, bleeding out on the page.

Maybe the writing is meant to draw it out. Maybe grief just lingers if you don’t let out, festering under the surface for months and years, coloring your world from within. Writing allows me to attach tags to the feelings and memories as they float by, and tags and symbols I can manipulate. Feelings I cannot. But I clearly didn’t learn my lesson from yesterday, if that lesson was to back off. I don’t know what I’m doing, but I clearly need to do it. I’m just really tired of crying. It would be nice to find something else to do with my free time for a while.

But seriously, how can you not love that song.