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.

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.

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.

Abandonment Part 1

The following is the first in a series of blogs on abandonment. I strongly encourage you to respond with comments, questions, or ideas in the comments section. Abandonment is such a huge issue for so many people, that any dialogue, discussion, or sharing about it could be extremely beneficial for anyone in the blogging community who struggles with it.

        The word “abandonment” is a positively terrifying word for those who are petrified of being left. Which is to say, most of us. Or that population of most of us who are in touch with that piece of ourselves.
        Rejection, loneliness, insecurity, inadequacy, worthlessness, shame, hopelessness, and despair can all be triggered by the “A” word. That’s one reason it can feel so impossibly painful. Because abandonment ignites virtually every other smoldering hurt we have. And it sets ablaze anything else that is already up for us. We can be burning alive. And if we’re in denial about the pain, or if we’re depressed and therefore numb, we don’t even know that we’re on fire.
        Abandonment is not content with attacking us by itself. As if it were not overwhelming enough, it recruits all of our other great pains too. Soon, it’s as though we’re drowning in a toxic stew of our greatest sufferings and our most frightening nightmares.
        Abandonment takes no prisoners. It can feel like it’s trying to kill you. Maybe it is. Because the pain is so great, we sometimes believe that death might feel better. Maybe abandonment is doing us a favor by trying to kill us so that we don’t have to suffer anymore.
        If our abandonment issue goes deep enough, it feels like it’s who we are. There is nothing deeper. It is us. Everything else on top is just frosting over this dark, tortured self. That means we will never be rid of it. We will never be over it. It will always be with us, and it will run us whenever we face it.
        Our abandonment pain comes from somewhere back in childhood. If it goes back far enough, we don’t consciously remember the incidents or memories that created the original wounds.
        In my case, it goes back as far back as it possibly can. Birth.
        Right out of the womb that I shared with my twin brother, I got shipped off into an incubator for three weeks. Alone. No mom. No dad. No twin. No hanging out in the hospital room with the family for a few days. Nobody at all, except a nurse who fed me a few times a day. I don’t even know how much, if at all, she touched me when she fed me. Judging by how affectionate I am, and by my desire and love of physical contact, I’d guess that I probably wasn’t touched much at all my first three weeks of life.
        Being left alone at birth like that is similar to what an orphan experiences. I’m not comparing my entire childhood to that of an orphan’s childhood. But I am drawing a parallel to my original wound and the original wound of an orphan. Or with anyone else who can’t consciously remember the pain of their original abandonment.
        This emotional and physical orphaning leaves very deep, very big, very painful scars. The issue can loom large in our lives. Especially in our intimate relationships. That’s where the rubber meets the road. Because it was an initial love relationship with a parent, or parents, that created the original wound. We carry that with us into every intimate relationship from then on. Only when we become aware of it and choose to face it can we be set free. Like the worst monster we can imagine, unresolved abandonment can keep us prisoner our entire lives.
        To me, that monster looked so enormous, so invincible, that the only solution seemed to be to never face it. For it will eat me alive and still be hungry. The only way to beat abandonment was to not risk being abandoned. To not be completely vulnerable. I avoided putting myself so far out there emotionally that there’s no turning back. I didn’t let myself love anyone with absolutely everything, EVERYTHING, I had. It was measured love. Restricted giving of self. Safety.
        I’ve been there most of my life. Maybe you have, too. But I'm not there anymore. Because I’m tired of loving that way. I’m tired of living that way. And I’ve found a way out. It can be slow. It is painful. And it works.

© 2008 Clint Piatelli. All Right (and Wrongs) Reserved