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Entries in Abandonment (18)

Thursday
Jan152009

Concentration: Camp (part 2)

        Separation anxiety was not a term that I was familiar with when I was a kid. And even if I was, it wouldn’t have meant anything to me, because it’s too abstract a concept for most ten year olds. But it’s a very real, potentially traumatizing phenomenon. It’s understood much better today than it was thirty-five years ago. Which is great. Because that’s undoubtedly saved countless twins from experiencing the same psychological carnage that I went through.
        See, it all goes back to the womb.
        Twins come into the world having began life together. From the very first moment of inception. That immediately sets them apart form the vast majority of people who begin the process of life alone. The first existence I was aware of outside of my own was that of my twin brother’s. Maybe even before I was aware of my mother’s. This creates a unique connection, a unique circumstance, the impact of which should not be underestimated.
        Before Mike and I went to camp, we had spent most of our time together. We slept in the same bedroom. We went to the same school. Different classrooms, but he was never usually more than a few hundred feet away. And after school, we were always together. Well not always. Mike liked to be by himself a lot more than I did. But we ate together. Played together. Made shit up together. Watched TV together. For ten years, that was the way it was.
        Then one day, just like that, it all changed. I suddenly spent virtually no time with him at all. I only occasionally knew where he was. We no longer shared the same bedroom. Or ate at the same table. Or played together. Or did anything together. It was a huge change. A huge, sudden, traumatic change. For me. Mike seemed to be okay with it. Which I’m glad about. I wouldn’t wish went I went through on anybody. Least of all him.
        I didn’t realize it at the time (how many ten year olds can psychoanalyze themselves?), but that change freaked me out beyond belief. It fucked me up big time. And that was just one in a long list of childhood issues that came charging to the surface the day I started camp.
        My intense separation anxiety makes perfect sense. When we were born, after spending nine glorious months together inside the Womb Hotel, Mike went home. I went to a metal incubator for three weeks. I got separated from my mother. I got separated from loving human contact. I got separated from him. That was the original separation anxiety that I was reliving at camp.
        I needed to be with him, because I lost him in my first moment of birth. He lost me as well, but I can’t speak for him. And he, thank god, went to be with his mother and father and family. He went home. I got shipped out. I got abandoned. Completely. Right from the first moment that I could be. And that has made me very different from him. Especially in how I deal with relationships. In how I deal with myself. And in how we deal with each other.
        At camp, of course I was terribly homesick. I missed all my friend’s in the idyllic summer community of Nyes Neck, North Falmouth. Any kid would. I missed my parents. I missed my older brother, who I idolized, and two older sisters. I missed my sister in law, and my beautiful little niece who I absolutely adored.
        But most of all, I missed my twin brother. Being away from him was what I had the hardest time with. I know this for an absolute, verifiable, experimentally proven fact because one year, in their infinite authoritative wisdom, the chuckleheads put us in the same cabin together. The result? I had a great time at camp. I actually liked it. A lot. Then the next two years, we were separated again. The result? Pain.
        You think the powers that be would have learned something from that year we were in the same cabin. Here’s a kid who, for three years is a candidate for “the most miserable camper on earth” award, and the next is having the time of his life. And all you did differently was put him in the same cabin as his twin brother. You’d think they would have figured that out. But they weren’t really paying attention. They were sticking to dogma. Well wake up, jerk-offs. This is what you do for a living.
        Yeah, I still have some anger around it. It’s not up much, but writing about it raises the pain, which raises the anger. Which is good. Because it reminds me that I still have some work to do on it. And the people weren’t really jerk-offs. They just weren’t enlightened. They were not accepting new information. They were too closed minded.
        I like to think the world has come a lot further since then. I know I have.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a womb full of Wrongs) Reserved.

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Wednesday
Jan142009

Concentration: Camp (part 1)

        There have been a few moments in my life when I felt something instantly shift inside of me, and I suddenly knew that I would never be the same. Moments when something within gets moved so drastically that my inner landscape is altered forever. It feels like an explosion.
        This explosion destroys what was there before, and creates a New Awareness. And The Awareness has a voice that says “You are different now”.
        One of those moments occurred on June 12, 2008, after I saw principessa for the first time after she broke up with me. Another one of those moments happened when I was ten years old. My first day of camp.
        The first nine years of my life, I spent every day of the summer in North Falmouth on Cape Cod. I loved it there. My twin brother and I had lots of friends, with two of them living right next door. We sailed in the morning, swam in the afternoon, and played baseball at night until it got so dark you couldn’t see the ball. The games would always end when either somebody’s parent would show up or one of us got clobbered by a ball we could barely see. In between all that, we would play street hockey, super heroes, and the occasional rainy day game of monopoly, which usually ended in a fight.
         By all accounts, it was a perfect way for a boy to spend the summer.
         And then, at ten years old, we got sent to camp for the month of July.
         For weeks before we went, everybody was telling me to “watch out for your twin brother”. Mike wasn’t fat like me, and he was shorter. He was also quieter, wore glasses, and was more introverted. People misinterpreted all that as signs of frailty. They thought that I would love camp, and that Mike would have a hard time.
         Boy did planet earth misread that one.
         When we arrived at camp, I was relatively excited. They separated Mike and I so that we were in two different cabins. That didn’t seem like a big deal. All seemed to be going okay.
         Then. That moment.
         My parents pulled away in their Buick Electra 225 as I waved goodbye at the edge of camp. Mike had already said goodbye and was nowhere to be found, a clear portent of things to come. I turned away from the car and looked down the wide, tree lined path that lead to Iroquois Village, my home for the next month.
         All of a sudden, as I stared down that empty path, I froze. I felt a sickening rush that I had never before experienced. Suddenly, out of nowhere, my head felt like it was on fire. My body was immobile, and as heavy as lead. Inside, the whole of my chest sank, plummeted actually, right out of my body. I felt completely empty. Where but a second ago there resided in me an energy and a vitality and a vibrant, beating heart, now, there was nothing. Nothing but pain and sorrow.
         At that moment, I felt my life ripped out of me. In an instant, my life went from just fine to complete misery.
         And all I did was turn around.
         The other shoe had dropped. No. The other boot had dropped. No. The other impossibly massive, steel toed boot had just kicked my insides right out of me.
         And all I did was turn around.
         I felt totally alone. And I was scared to death. To Death.
         I knew, at that moment, that the next month of my life was going to be a kind of hell that I had never even dreamed about. I didn’t know why. But I knew.
         And all I did was turn around.
         I carry that fear with me to this day. That fear that life can inexplicably and suddenly become a nightmare by simply turning around. It’s not usually up, but it’s always with me. Deep inside, there is still that sensation of utter emptiness, excruciating agony, and complete loneliness.
         It’s a scar that has not completely healed. Not yet.
         But it will. I can feel it.

©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a camp full of Wrongs) Reserved.

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Thursday
Dec042008

Round Mountain

       When I was a kid, I had this recurring dream. This recurring nightmare. There stood in front of me a rock. Actually, it was a boulder. No, it was more like a mountain. A round mountain. I was expected to push this round mountain, to move it. All by myself. Nobody in the dream told me I had to move it. But I knew I had to just the same.
        I also knew that I would spend the rest of my life trying, alone, in vain, to move that round mountain. I knew that I would never get any help, and that it would never budge. Not one millionth of an inch. Every moment of my entire life was henceforth going to consist of trying to move this round mountain and never making any progress.
        Staring at this round mountain and contemplating the rest of my existence, I experienced downright suicidal hopelessness and despair. When I woke up, always in a cold sweat and breathing heavily, my relief that it was just a dream knew no bounds. I was grateful beyond measure.
        That dream recurred from the time I was about seven until late in my teens. Up until a few years ago, I had never told anybody about that dream. Not my parents, or my siblings, or my friends, or my teachers, or even my stuffed animals. It was too horrible to contemplate. So like almost everything else I felt then, I kept it inside, and tried to forget about it.
        That nightmare literally scared the life out of me.
        I’ve often thought since then what a sublime and subtly horrific dream that was for a child to have. What I’ve understood since then, is that although I was just a kid, I had already developed adult sized fears. I skipped right over the G-Rated phobias and went right to the R-Rated ones.
        What I didn’t realize as a child was that my waking life resembled that dream. An overall sense of hopelessness, despair, frustration, and melancholy pervaded me as a kid. The dream just reflected that, on the subconscious stage of my sleep.
        I don’t have that dream anymore. But I still remember how it felt, and sometimes I can go there while I’m awake. Sometimes, I still feel that nightmarish level of despair and hopelessness. And, just like it did then, it scares the life out of me.
        I’m good at procrastinating. I’m a pro at letting certain things build to a point where it’s no longer just a deed to be done or a problem to solve. Now, it’s a project. A huge, messy project. If I do that with enough things in my life, I can get that awful feeling again. What I call the “round mountain syndrome”.
        Not again, I tell myself. Not after all the work I’ve done. How the hell do I periodically keep coming back to this shit? Despite all my progress and growth. Despite the profound breakthroughs and awakenings and shifts I’ve experienced over the past six months. Despite all that, this fuckin’ waking dream will not go away.
        It comes up for a reason. It comes up because I still need to work on it. I know that, but that doesn’t help me when it shoves itself into my life. When that happens, I feel crushed by that round mountain. It takes up the whole sky. It takes up all my space, both inside and out. It looms omnipresent. It is both the immovable object and the irresistible force. Like the song by the band Boston, this is more than a feeling. It’s a pervasive, underlying attitude and perspective that still occasionally rears it’s butt ugly head. And I hate it. It goes against my natural enthusiasm and passion and energy. It feels like a cancer that I just want to cut out of me and be done with.
        But I always move through it. I take much better care of myself now, especially when I'm in trouble. I’ll work out more, and let the endorphins kick into hyperdrive. I’ll pray more, and meditate more, and do some yoga, even though I’m as tight as a piano wire. I’ll get in a few extra al-anon meetings, and talk to people about where I’m at instead of keeping it inside. I’ll write about it now too, and share it here. It all helps. And I move out of it much quicker than I used to. I don’t stay there long anymore. That alone is reason to be hopeful and buoyant.
        Maybe someday this feeling will go away and never come back. And then again, maybe I’ll have to deal with it for the rest of my life.
        If it does keep coming back, though, I’ll tell you something I’m actually looking forward to. And that’s being in bed some night with a woman I love and telling her about this dream. Sharing, for the first time in my life with my lover, this positively awful nightmare and that positively awful place that I can still sometimes go. Because I’m no longer afraid to be so vulnerable. I’m no longer ashamed to admit that some nights, I need to just crawl into her soft embrace and absolutely melt into her warm, loving body. Letting myself completely go. Breaking down if I have to. Crying if I need to. While she holds me, listens, and loves me back to the present. Back to a time and place where I can share the nightmare of the round mountain with the woman I love. Back to a time and place where I don’t have to go through this alone, and I can finally ask somebody for help.

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a Round Mountain full of Wrongs) Reserved.

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Tuesday
Dec022008

Tree

        Scared. Anxious. And lonely.
        These feelings go deep. These feelings go old.
        I know this, because they don’t require any conscious thought to surface. Like a big old maple tree in the back yard of my mind, they have been present for as long as I’ve drawn breath.
        Fear, anxiety, and loneliness took root right out of the womb, when I was separated from my twin brother and stuck in an incubator for he first three weeks of life. Like the maple tree in the yard that’s always been there, those feelings have created a formidable presence. They show up in the corner of my emotional eye even when I’m not looking at them. Like the tree, they can feel omnipresent, even when I’m not playing in them. Even when I’m not near them. They cast a long shadow. It sometimes feels as though no matter what I do, or where I go, or who I become, I can not get out of that shadow.
        If I look closer at that tree of fear, anxiety, and loneliness, I understand that it has a consciousness. And just like a real maple tree, we’re not always aware of this consciousness because, as humans, we can’t understand it. Or we don’t believe it exists.
        But It does. Just like a real maple is saying something to me when I look at it, my tree is communicating to me as well.
        What he’s saying to me is that, more than anything, he needs something. He wants something.
        He wants Connection. Community. Love.
        But he is deathly afraid that he will never get it.
        So the tree grows himself bigger and stronger and more beautiful. Because he wants to attract people. But at the same time, because he doesn’t believe he will ever get true connection or community or love, he’s trying to prove to himself, and to everybody else, that he’s so big and strong and beautiful that he doesn’t need or want any of that from anybody else. He can give it to himself just fine, thank you.
        That tree is the part of me that never knew what I wanted because to know what I wanted was synonymous with not getting it.
        As long as I kept myself in the fog of not knowing what I wanted, or as long as I consciously just didn’t want it, there was nothing to worry about. You can’t worry about not getting something if you don’t want it. That was me, my whole life.
        But by finally acknowledging that I don’t want to play life as a game of solitaire, that I don’t want to be a lone warrior anymore, I become vulnerable.
        No shit.
        Excluding material possessions, which were always plentiful, as a kid I learned not to want or need anything that I couldn’t give to myself. Perpetually lonely, anxious, and sad, at some point I stopped asking for what I needed and wanted because I wasn’t getting it. Unconsciously, I decided it was better not to want or need much of anything. I also decided that I better learn to give to myself, because nobody else was going to.
        So I set myself up for a troubled existence. I was created to give love, to receive love. To connect to others and build those connections into all types of intimate relationships. I was created to share what was inside of me, and to welcome what was inside of others. I was made to be part of communities that serve their members.
        When I was a kid, that’s all I wanted. That’s all I needed. And quite frankly, I didn’t get much of any of it. So I went the other way. Not socially, but emotionally. Not on the outside. On the inside. I blocked off all those precious things I wanted because I didn’t believe I could ever have them.
        And those walls came tumblin’ down this summer. So now, what I’ve always needed and wanted is staring me right in the face saying “It’s about time you saw us, and heard us, and recognized us. We didn’t go anywhere. You did. You’re back. Welcome.”
        But now I’m petrified because I want again. I need again. And I’ve spent most of my life running from that and denying it. And at the same time, a part of me doesn’t believe I can ever have what I really want or need. That part screams to me, in a voice so loud sometimes it’s all I hear; “You’ve been that route before! It didn’t work then! It won’t work now!”
        But now I can’t do what I used to. I can’t fight what my heart truly wants anymore. I can’t fight that part of who I am anymore. Not because I’m not strong enough. I’m stronger than ever. Emotionally. Physically. Mentally. No. It’s because I’ve experienced the most profound shift of my life. The shift to fully embrace what I feel. To live from my heart and not my head. I don’t want to run away anymore. I want to run towards.
        And maybe it takes even more strength to embrace all of who you are, what you want, and that which you were made for, than it takes to fight it. Fighting it certainly takes strength. In fact, it’s exhausting. But embracing it takes strength and courage and faith and trust and belief. And it gives me energy, rather than suck it from me. Embracing takes a true warrior spirit. It takes more. So I have to be more. And I am more.
        And if I can own that I am more, I can speak to the tree in my mind. The one who’s scared and anxious and lonely. I can connect to that kid in me who’s cynical about ever getting what he really wants. What he really needs. I can connect to them and say “Trust me. I won’t let you down.”
        And I won’t.
        Because my heart knows better. My soul knows better. And that’s what I try to listen to now.

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a tree full of Wrongs) Reserved

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Monday
Nov102008

Giovanni & Boy - Part 1

       Abraham Lincoln said “A House divided against itself can not stand.” I offer that a person divided against him or her self has no better chance than a house.
        I was once a much more splintered personality. A man in conflict with himself. I had no idea what I wanted, because I was fighting with myself to find the answers. Today, I’m far from whole, but I’m getting there.
        Nowhere was I more emotionally conflicted than in my relationships with women. One side of me adored women without limit. The other side was in mortal fear of them.
        I was petrified because women could, and had, hurt me worse than I ever dreamed possible. And my macho bullshit ego believed that it was absolutely, completely, no-questions-asked-please-take-your-suitcase-and-get-the-hell-out-of-here-unacceptable to admit to yourself, or anybody else, that a man could be afraid of a woman. So I simply denied it.
        On the other hand, I was very in touch with the part of me who loved women. I’ll call this part “Giovanni”. I loved this guy. So did women. But I wasn’t crazy about the other dude. In fact, I hated him. I’ll call him “Boy”. He was fearful and anxious. So I hid him. From myself and from everybody else.
        But this Boy was still inside of me. And he still had a job to do: protect my heart. He got good at that. He could pull me away just a little, or completely shut me down, or employ many other methods. To keep me safe.
        Only when I accepted him, listened to him, embraced him, and had compassion for him, like a father does for his troubled son, did Boy stop trying to protect me. Only then did my relationship with this Boy, who was petrified of women, change.
        I did that this past summer when my heart got ripped out of me. I faced this frightened little Boy when his worst nightmare came true. He came running to me, devastated, alone, sobbing uncontrollably, screaming in pain. That’s when my own heart melted for myself.
I could not hide him any longer. I could not deny him or negate him one more moment. He was hurting worse than I had ever imagined. He had to be seen and heard. So I watched. And I listened. I spent lots of time with him and I got to know him. I got to love him. And so I got to love myself too. Funny how that works.
        Ever since I can remember, this Boy who feared women was in a No Holds Barred Steel Cage Texas Death Match with the other part of me who absolutely loved women. Within my own being, it was perpetual emotional mayhem. Giovanni and Boy were constantly duking it out.
        The dichotomy between the two of them was of Jekyll and Hyde proportions. While Boy is deathly afraid of women, Giovanni finds them the most compelling, beautiful, alluring, fascinating, magnificent creatures on the planet. He can barely contain his enthusiasm when he’s with them.
        For instance, I love placing my face firmly into the neck of a woman and inhaling. Lettering her sweet, unique scent fill my entire body, I experience a broad spectrum of sensations and emotions. Soothing contentment. Burning animal desire. Helpless rapture. Passion. Weakness. Love. And that’s just from smelling her neck.
        Reconciling this, and countless other intense female induced experiences, with the part of me that had to protect myself, took up considerable space inside me.
        There was, in reality, no reconciliation. There was forced tolerance. Like a couple who stays together not out of love but out of necessity. Giovanni and Boy coexisted because they had to. They didn’t like each other. Or understand each other. But they lived in the same house. Me. And that house was divided. And that house could not stand. Not any longer. So I crawled. On my knees. Into a new house that could.

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights, Wrongs, and Otherwise Omitted Deficiencies Reserved.

 

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