Opening yourself open to yourself
Theres been so much that’s gone on in life.
Breakdown, what is a breakdown?
Does it travel through you and just get to your core?
1994~ my core exposed, my vulnerabilities askew.
I lost sight of everything. My environment had totally broken down. Everything seemed so real, yet at the same time so far away,
I dove into Nietzschean ideals. I pounded my life out of my life.
It seemed I drove myself into a million pieces
My book of madness was a small spiral notebook, of which I jotted down everything that came into my mind. I felt a victim of the world, torn between countries, love and religion.
The last page. That last page. I drew a crucifiction. I didn’t know why I had done that. It seemed outside of my realm. I was antichristian at the time, I felt religion was a total weakness.
The bow finally broke.
As my mind started to spiral, I only had one thing in mind, and that was to try to stay as “good” as i could.
What did good mean, I had no idea. I just wanted to be an honest person with a good soul, that i inertly knew I posssessed.
I ended up in a psychiatric hospital in the weeks to come.
That first trip, wow.
I get into this room. There is what seems to be a college student with a nurse. The college student with a white coat didn’t seem to be a doctor at all, but I complied.
He had me close my eyes and count after i looked at a paper with dots.
He told her, “watch this”
I heard him, and the dots that I had seen seemed to appear in my mind as he counted.
It was strange, it sounded as if they were doing sexual things as my eyes were closed.
I briefly opened them, and was scolded to keep them closed. It was the biggest trip ever. I never knew what hit me, or what was happening.
It felt strange, like a new world was created for me in just a few minutes.
Finally , I was admitted.
I didn’t trust the situation at all.
My first step inside, I never trusted a soul. I mocked all the doctors, and was eventually tied down naked in four point restraints in an isolation room.
I waited and tried to get out for 3 days. My wrists and ankles had scars for months.
A girl that worked nights there came those times.
I don’t know what her deal was, but she got a kink out of screwing me.
That happened on night 2, and again on night 3.
I never thought much of it. I almost looked at it like it was at least something positive going on for me.
Now I look back and know that I was basically raped, but I questioned nothing.
The end of the 3rd night she loosened the restraint on my left hand.
The next day a bitchy nurse was upset because she had wanted to know who had loosened it, I never said a thing, and afterwards, the girl never came in again.
I blocked out the fact of what happened in that isolation room for years, I never knew why, but now I do. I oddly remember getting “convulsive treatment therapy” which is a just a nice term for shock therapy. It truly is shock therapy, After it’s over, the whole body is sore, and the mind is shattered into so many pieces it takes some time for semblance to come back together to remember your old thoughts,
During that stay, I remember telling a staff member that “I wouldn’t get on that cross!”
I was fixated on the end of that madmanic last page of that journal
I pointed to the cross over the lobby area. It was a Catholic hospital. Aggravated, he chastised me, and said, “You’re not going on any cross!”
I finally was able to talk to a doctor that I thought I could somewhat trust and he became my psychiatrist.
Years later he told me he had left that place because there was sexual abuse going on there and administrators were covering it up.
He left out the part that I may have been involved. Either he didn’t know, or that was his way of handling things. He held to his word, he stopped being a psychiatrist in that hospital,
In that stay, they ghoulishly brought my mind back to life.
I left there a shell of what I was. I was confused and felt totally broken. My life had frightfully changed.
I now had to see social workers with last names that literally meant sickness in other lauguages,
What had happened? I wondered that for a long time.
After all these years, what stood out all this time was that last page I had drawn in that notebook. The notebook that I explicitly told the initial institution I wanted back. They never did give it back to me.
Now since then, I’ve lived a different life, I’ve been married, had two beautiful kids, and now divorced.
The divorce just finalized. Just about 33 years after that initial “breakdown”
I left it with a bitter taste.
I did love my ex wife. I loved her more than I could love myself. I had felt I had pushed my way through our marriage no longer looking for anything but comfort. The comfort of not feeling the pain broke into my psyche.
I didn’t share much in my life with her. From the first weeks of our relationship, I was made to feel embarrassed by my own feelings, as she was with some of my public offerings of affections for her. She eventually met with my psychiatrist and I to find out how damaged I was.
That devastated me and aggravated my doctor. He approved me in her eyes.
After I had proposed shortly after a steamy romance, I met her family. She had a big family, and having big get togethers was a typical occurance.
I felt a nervous wreck, and a bit chastised. My knees literally knocked themselves into each other, just like a scared kid in a movie.
Her family was huge, and immediately I felt unworthy to them. The day of our wedding, her uncle actually yelled out to her that my love to her was genuine. I couldn’t blame him for that, but I was upset that that came upon our wedding day.
From day one, I felt like I was never taken seriously by most of her family, and scrutinized the whole marriage.
In that time I did whatever I could to keep my mind at ease. The plaguing feeling of worthlessness crept over my person like an oncoming storm.
We slowly grew apart.
She kept wanting the love we initially had that she had denied. The moments she passed over either in embarrassment or in haste.
In all honesty, its hard to bring feelings like that back when they were broken up so selfishly to begin with. The disingenuousness just made me feel like an actor that couldn’t act the part.
It’s not that I didn’t love her, but didn’t love her the way she had wanted. She wanted to be always craved to be special. She always was to me, but her early rejections of my adorations struck my heart not with the arrow of cupid, but by the arrow of a hunter.
I felt my love being rejected, and eventually ended up feeling like nothing but a maid to her in the end.
Towards the end there were different demands. Be it changing my behavior, cleaning the house or even having sex. I grew apart from her. I was even nervous by her presence as things were in their final chapters.
I couldn’t be who she wanted me to be. We were in marriage counseling at one point. Later that therapist became her own. She told her that she had thought she should divorce me. I wouldn’t trust therapists quite much after that.
In the last months while we were still together she mentioned also that my father told her to divorce me.
I never understood why she would tell me that, but when she did, it hurt.
I was always feeling like a loser, an embarrassment, and a bum.
Breakdown?
Finally, we divorce.
This last March, the most painful month in my life.
I looked back at my regrets in sadness, my cowardice in shame. I could have been a better husband, father and man, I thought.
Then everything came back full circle.
At the very end, I came to feel like my life had reflected that of a Judas, because of a line my attorney injected in the last day of court. It was wording in the decree that I knew she didn’t want in, Her attorney never gave a proper objection to it and it became part of the divorce.
I felt like I personally betrayed her, like a Judas.
Here’s the trip,
In the chaos and madness of the divorce I kept making odd, and strange parallels to my past. As if years ago, when I was young, this seemed to be predetermined.
My breakdown~ was it just a way to steer me past my fears to get a better understanding of what life was and how to handle it? Or was it a just a masquerade as a testament to my soul, Was this truly an expulsion from the legions of heaven, or an expulsion from the cultural trappings of religion?
The diary of my madness ended with me being crucified in an area I pictured.
At this time, I live in nearly the exact same area.
She was born on Christmas
It was around 33 years from my the time of my breakdown,
She had an eventual affair who had given her the ability the help to get away from me. Which, to me was like another man picking up the cross at the end of Jesus’ journey for him.
There was a variation of Mark in his name, and it is in verses of Mark of which talk about Judas’ betrayal of Jesus.
The betrayal, I thought, ” I was like a Judas”
Yet that wasn’t rational, I was just seeming to fill in blanks that could make that 19 year old event make sense.
We were married 19 years.
So, was I a Judas in my life? I broken promises to myself and other, perhaps I am.
Is there life after guilt? Of course there is, in any situation we have the strength to rise above if we are honest at heart.
It was as if my life had become a quite boring movie. Makes me feel like my marriage was never really real. Almost like something out of the Truman show.
Now my trip changes,
Now, though I have a high spiritual loyalty to Christianity, I feel like in my desperate hours, during my most serene, and sanctified moments were rectified against me in the end, trapping me to a fate of fear.
I don’t deflect the pain I caused in my marriage, I accept it.
I projected that I was to have a wife. a house, kids and pets. That became, What I didn’t was its failure.
Life was chiseling itself out over time, yet from those chisel marks came a pattern that controlled who and what I had become. and though I still question moments and fault hoods, nothing matters. In the end the Love we shared was broken apart by both of us.
There is new life now.
Its different,
Very miser like and weak is my soul, but not from the stigma of religion.
The stigmata only brought forth life, a new life.
This process gave me the ability to take some time in and see things as not a system or structure, but merely a convoluted comedy of errors.
I’ve come to see other broken people, with different broken problems, and different broken hearts, There are a lot of similar people,
I see that there is space beyond what I thought the foundation of life. There is beauty, even from this beast that had ravaged me for so long. The beauty is objection to the same perception. The beauty is giving up on the end, and moving into the new world
Death trip is over, Religious trip is wrapping up.
The new trip is a new life, and here I’ll open the old back up.
Space beyond, overcoming the entrapments of fear of spirit, Rising above to a new perception of reality.