Maybe I'm Crazy

         Maybe you think I’m crazy for nakedly sharing how I feel on a website. Closer to the truth, maybe I think I’m crazy. Maybe I am. But there are worse things than being bonkers. Being asleep at the wheel, for one thing. Which is what I was for over a year and a half after my dad died.
         Those were My Dark Ages. Twenty months of sleep walking through life. Six-hundred days of not knowing who the hell I was or what the fuck I was doing. The “Who”, the “What”, and the “Why” of my life were questions that I grappled with long before my dad passed away. I was actively engaged in a quest. After he died, I went into depression. And although I was doing most of the same things I was doing while he was alive, I stopped involving myself in finding any answers. I was just going through the motions. I didn’t believe that I would ever find what I was looking for. In fact, I no longer knew what I was looking for. And I stopped believing that I would ever find any relief in the answers if I found them. So why bother searching? All of a sudden, absolutely nothing made sense. Nothing mattered.  
         Pundits speak of "The Big Three" changes that create maximum stress and trauma in one's life. Death. Moving. Divorce. In the span of nine months, I experienced the first two outright, a taste of the last, and a bludgeoning of a few other losses. My father was dead. I moved out of my home. My girlfriend of over four years and I split. And the hits kept coming. My band, which was like a great little boys club, broke up. I loved the guys in my band. Still do. My twin brother, one of those band members, and I had a huge falling out. I had been estranged from most of my family for quite some time. But after my dad died. whatever emotional connection I had left to them basically disappeared. There seemed to be this vacuum that was sucking away everything that I cared about in my life. I unconsciously determined that the only way I could handle all of this was to stop feeling.
         All this pain inside of me had no place to go. But it had to go somewhere. It had to be released. So it started eating it’s way out of me. Like an tiger trapped in a cage made of raw meat. The animal had to be free. And if I had to be eaten alive in the process, so be it. And that’s exactly what started happening.
        I used to think that depression was when I felt so much pain that I got...depressed. But that’s not it. Depression happened when I stopped feeling, and then turned those feelings against myself. All that anger became self anger. All the hurt became ammunition in a merciless barrage of self-criticism and self-judgment. In order for my pain to eat itself out of me, it had to get positively aggressive. It had to turn itself against me. Which it did. As a result, I hated myself. I hated my life.
        I had people in my life who loved me, but I couldn’t feel it. I knew it, but I couldn’t feel it. Because I couldn’t find one drop of self love anywhere within me. It didn’t matter what they said or did, because I was still no fuckin’ good. These people could see that I was in pain, but they didn't know just how bad it was. I couldn’t possibly let them in on that. Because that’s about as unattractive as it gets. They see that, they are gone. Then I’m really alone. I didn’t see a way out.  
       Before I became too self destructive, I broke out of that self manifested hell and into a whole new world. And I’ll tell you more about that another time.
       What happened to me during My Dark Ages, both internally and externally, set me up for the transformation that I experienced this past summer. This worst period of my life actually helped me heal.
       Let me leave you with this. Real Change is possible. Outright Metamorphosis does happen. More often than we know. Even though I asked to change, prayed for it, for years, I never thought it would happen to me (does that sound too much like the beginning of a Penthouse Forum story?). But it did happen. I changed. Dramatically. From the inside. If you want it bad enough, keep asking for it, keep doing for it, you shift. Not necessarily when we want, and usually not through the door we expect. I'll be writing more about my story. I'd love to hear some of yours. Go to the Life Change page and tell about something that changed your life. Or post a comment.

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