June 12, 2008: Z-Day

        Why “Z-Day”? Because “D-Day” was already taken. An alternative explanation could simply be, paraphrasing a burping, drunken brother Blutarsky from Delta Tau Chi: “Why not!?”
        Actually, I just like the ring of Z-Day. And although the moniker is silly and arbitrary, the day that it denotes is not. Not for me anyway.
        It was a year ago today that I literally felt something inside of me move. A little explosion happening just in the space of my being that rearranged my mind and altered how I felt, about almost everything, in the course of a single moment.
        I didn’t know it in that moment, but my heart had exploded. Shut down and hiding in isolation within the darkness of my pain since my dad had died twenty months before, my heart finally allowed some light to enter the prison that it had walled itself inside of. And that light caused a blast. A big blast.
        Just like in a real explosion, the second before it happens, things look and feel one way. And the moment after it happens, everything is different.
        Inside of me, I could feel that something big had occurred. But I could not fathom how big. Nor could I grasp how drastically it’s consequences would change my life. I just knew I was different. I just knew that my life had somehow changed from what it was just a second before.
        The heart explosion happened so fast and so powerfully that my mind and body immediately went into a kind of shock. I actually felt myself disappear for a minute, just after it happened. I felt a rush sweep over me, a massive wave of feeling crashing against my insides, and then I was gone. I came back a minute later.
        In a flash too bright for the rest of me to see, my heart was now once again alive. My heart could now once again allow itself to feel. My path had just changed. Drastically.
        The catalyst for this explosion that was to alter my life was my heart’s blinding realization that I was madly in love with the woman I was looking at. And I had been for a long time.
        Please join me on my next post for more gut wrenching honesty and all the gory details....


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and five emotional beach fronts of wrongs) Reserved.

Thank You Hope

        On the fourteenth of June, in the year of our lord two-thousand-and eight (that sounds so official, doesn’t it?), I spent the evening with a woman I was madly in love with at Plymouth beach. As wonderful as that sounds, and it was, there’s a lot more to it than that.
        While sitting on the beach just before sunset, she mentioned the title of a book that for some reason stuck with me. We covered so much ground that night, it wouldn’t have surprised me if I didn’t remember it. But I did. Because that night, I was truly present. I was fully engaged in the moment, and more myself, than I had been in months, possibly years. That night seemed to go by in slow motion. It was as though every word that we spoke, every feeling that we had, every moment that we shared, was painted on a giant canvas, right in front of us. Like watching a painting being created right before our eyes. All we had to do to see exactly what had happened was look up. It was all right there. The totality of our shared experience preserved like a landscape scene on this constantly evolving painting.
        I felt completely different that night than I had in years. Since my father had died, almost nineteen months before, my life had not gone well. For the majority of that troubled year and a half, I felt like a spectator of my own life. It was as though my life wasn’t real, but just a movie that played in front of me, all of the time. A movie in which I was supposed to be starring, but actually, was not even in. Right before my eyes, alone in this vast theatre of self, I was watching my life happen. And I was alone. I was an audience of one. Lonely. Scared. Hurt. Overwhelmed with despair.
        “How much longer can I stand this?”, I would ask myself. “How much longer before I jump up on screen and start creating this movie - MY movie - instead of just watching it? How long will I suffer in this isolated, cavernous, lonely place?”. I didn’t have a clue. It felt like it might be forever. But I knew I couldn’t last that long. Eventually, I would choose the path of self-destruction over the path of disengagement. At some point, when it got as bad as it could get, I would engage in the movie the only way I would be capable of: I would destroy it. I would jump up on the screen and start wreaking as much havoc as I could. If the only thing I knew how to do was self-destruct, then that’s what I would do. I would go down in a tragic, self-indulgent blaze of false glory. Because that would be better than just dying alone in this theatre, wasting away to nothing as I helplessly watch my life fade to black.
        But this night with principessa on Plymouth beach was unlike any other I had experienced since I returned from California, almost two years ago, just before my father died. I came back form the golden state full of energy and promise and hope and optimism. But within a few months, circumstances completely derailed me. Actually, it was my response to those circumstances that derailed me. The circumstances were indeed bad, but if I had responded differently to those circumstances, they wouldn’t have affected me like they did. The death of my father was incredibly painful, and the actions of certain people around me were completely detestable, but I take full responsibility for how I responded. Once my father got hurt and began his slow demise, my world started to unravel, mostly because I let it. After his death, things in my family, and things in my life, got exponentially worse. And so did I.
        But as I said, this night on Plymouth beach, I felt different. I was softer. Much more open and not so guarded. More vulnerable. Days before, I had the first of many subsequent awakenings. I realized how I had disappeared over the previous year and a half. And I began to grieve all the loss I had experienced in that short time. Like a flower that had been closed for ages in fear, withering in pain and anger, I slowly began to open. The world literally looked and felt differently to me. And thus so did this woman who I had been with for almost a year. She had just broken up with me a few weeks before, but I had just recently allowed myself to feel it.
        That night ended with both of us in tears. A little over a month later, my friend and writing teacher from UCLA was in town with her husband. They’re both huge Red sox fans, and we went to a game together. During the course of the game, I mentioned to my friend the title of this book that principessa had told me about. To my surprise, my friend said she knew the author personally. I asked her if she wouldn’t mind getting the author to sign a copy of the book and send it to principessa. My friend said she’d be happy to. I was thrilled. She wouldn’t be seeing the author for a while, so I would have to be patient.
        I’ve never thought of myself as a patient person, but I’ve re-assessed that belief. I’ve come to understand that patience is simply a mind set, or more accurately, a spirit set. That is, if I have faith and confidence that I can somehow manifest whatever I’m needing patience for; if what I need to be patient about is deemed important enough to be worth waiting for; then I can exhibit the quality of patience. So if I have faith in myself to create, faith in the universe to give me what I need, and the belief that I’m worth it, then patience is simply giving my life the space it needs to manifest. That’s a way of being, which is not only a frame of mind but a frame of heart and a frame of spirit. It’s a mental, emotional, and spiritual pursuit. When I put patience in that framework, it doesn’t seem like a tortuous waiting game, but merely a cog in the soft machine of the process.
        So lo and behold, here we are in May, almost a year later, and this book is signed, sealed, and I had it delivered. I hope she likes it. I hope she can truly receive it. But whether she can or not, I’m happy I did it. It was a gift from my heart, with no expectations attached. I give it unconditionally, simply because it feels good to do so. It was a loving act who’s genesis began on a beach in Plymouth almost a year ago, on a very special night in my life. A night that signified my awareness of an open door that I willingly walked through. When I took that tenuous first step, I started down a different path. A path of light, not darkness. A path of openness, not protection. A path of engagement, not isolation. A path of vulnerability, not defense. A path of hope, not despair.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a hopelessly optimistic amount of Wrongs) Reserved.

Concentration: Camp (part 3)

        I wrote the piece below last year, when I was in a VERY dark place. I present it here for two main reasons. First, it demonstrates how far I’ve come in a year. I remember how I felt writing it, two days after my birthday: absolutely awful. Depressed. Withdrawn. Isolated. Alone. Hopeless. And I pretty much felt that way most of the time, with interludes of joy and levity.
         I spend so much less time there these days. That’s real progress.
         Second, it tells a truthful tale of trauma and tears that I have spent lots of time recovering from. I still struggle with some of the issues that my camp experience created today, but it was my life as a child. This reminds me that I’m a much happier adult than I ever was as a kid. My happiness trajectory is therefore going in the right direction. I’m optimistic that, as long as I continue to work on myself and remain committed to growth and change, I’ll just keep getting healthier and happier as I age. How many people truly feel that way?
         I’m blessed. And there is much I have to be thankful for. Which is much different than how I felt a year ago.


Tuesday, February 19, 2008

         Camp was a month long nightmare that I never really woke up from. I lost whatever enthusiasm I had left for life at camp. To a 10, 11, 12 year old boy, the prospect of experiencing the full agony of a month in hell was unbearable. So I shut down. I knew how to shut down before, because it was how I defended my young self against trauma. But I became a chronic professional at camp.
         What did I learn from camp?
          I learned that to have hope is just a way to exponentially increase pain and disappointment. I learned that I must be defective, that there must be something horribly wrong with me. Everybody at camp thinks it’s great, except me. I must be really fucked up. I learned that the beautiful experience of relief is not only short lived, but merely guarantees a bigger crash when it’s over. I learned that bringing problems to adults for help is not only a waste of time, but makes you feel worse in the end. I learned that asking for help, period, makes things worse, not better. I learned that everything is my fault. I learned that the world is a hostile place that doesn’t like me. In fact, it hates me. I learned that when you trust the people who are supposed to look out for you and care for you and protect you, you get royally screwed. I learned that those people responsible for my well being will lie to me, over and over again. I learned that I am absolutely, completely, unquestionably alone in this world. I learned how to be miserable. I learned despair and hopelessness and anguish. All by age 10, reinforced at ages 11 and 12.
         I learned that to get too excited about something was a sure fire way to have your heart shattered so violently that you may never find all of the pieces again. I learned that to want something more than anything else in the world and to believe that you could have it was nothing but a lie. That to want and to believe only lead to horrible pain and intolerable suffering. I learned that I have no control over my life; no control over how I feel or of what happens to me; no control over myself or my circumstances or my happiness. I learned that my emotions are at the mercy of some mysterious, unknown, random, internal process that guides my thoughts haphazardly and therefore runs my heart and my spirit roughshod along with it. I learned that I couldn’t do what I really wanted to do, that I couldn’t get what I really wanted, and that I couldn’t get what I really needed.
         I learned chronic depression and chronic anxiety and chronic fear and chronic ache that is always with me, even today, even in my moments of great joy. I learned that getting excited and wanting something very badly was indescribably dangerous and ultimately horribly painful. I learned how to live in a cage, in a prison; how to survive but never thrive. I learned how to become strangely and perversely comfortable functioning at this soul numbing flat line equilibrium. I learned to live in a constant fantasy world in order to escape the unrelenting horrible pain of reality. I learned that anything was better than the real thing. I learned how to completely avoid the present and live in the perceptibly less painful past or the can’t possibly be as painful future. I learned how to hate myself and how to hate my life.
         Thanx camp.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a very grateful amount of Wrongs) Reserved.

Mistress Music Part 2 - The Glory of Table Drumming

         A simple but revealing insight came to me not long after I began coming out of My Dark Ages. It occurred to me one day, like a flash of sunlight reflecting off a passing boat, that for almost two years I had not been humorously chastised for table drumming. This is because, for almost two years, I had not done any table drumming.
         Often enough (some would say obsessively enough), my fingers and hands are in rhythmic motion, tapping out beats and fills across counters, desks, tables, walls, doors, and people’s bodies. Whether music is playing or not. But I could not remember the last time somebody made a joke about it at my expense. Because for the longest time, I didn’t do it. It’s a silly little observation, but quite revealing.
         The music wasn’t alive in me during those difficult times. Not only was I not quasi-obsessively table drumming, but I was not responding emotionally to music at all. Usually, several times a week at least, a song will move me either to tears, to head banging, to singing, to air guitaring or air drumming, or to dancing. During My Dark Ages, which lasted over a year and a half, I hardly did any if that at all. Maybe only once or twice, and that’s it. When I realized that, I was astounded. It made me realize just how out of sorts I was during that time. A basic staple of my personality had not shown up for almost one hundred weeks. It was as though I hadn’t eaten in almost two years.
         I wasn’t letting music, or anything else for that matter, in. When I’m so walled off that not even music can reach me, well that’s only happened for one period in my entire life since I discovered, in my early teens, the magic of music and how it affected me.
         I wasn’t even in a band during My Dark Ages, and that’s the first time since I started playing at thirteen that I had gone more than six months without being in a group or having a live performance. That may be the most telling emotional statistic of all.
         Every girlfriend I’ve ever had has made light hearted, amorous comments about my table drumming. Every girlfriend that is, except my last one, principessa. She rarely saw me at anything remotely close to my best. She never got to experience more than a fraction of all of me, because I was incapable of giving anything more than that. If I had the opportunity to ask her if she ever remembers me going nuts over a piece of music, be it table drumming, singing aloud, wailing on my air guitar, or spontaneously shaking my groove thang, she’d say “Yes, once”. And I’d know exactly what time she was talking about. It was right before the moment I fell in love with her.
         She had come down to my house on the cape with a mutual friend. We had met about a month before, and I hadn’t seen her since. When she came into the kitchen, I was busy air drumming to a live version of “I Shot The Sheriff” by Eric Clapton. I was way into it. Musically Possessed, you might even say. Eyes closed, my hands and feet moved all over my imaginary drum set in syncopated motions, with a focused reckless abandon. I was oblivious to the rest of the world. Because in those moments, this was the world. I didn’t even know she had walked into the room. For about a minute, she and two others watched me in this trance like state before our mutual friend screamed “Hello Clint!”. I looked up, and saw my future girlfriend there. I had forgotten how pretty she was. I walked over to her, grabbed her gently by the shoulders, and kissed her softly on the lips, saying it was nice to see her.
         Looking back, I know now that it was precisely then that I fell for her. It was a moment of clarity during a time of great confusion and turmoil. It’s also when I got scared stiff. My mind started running away as fast as my heart had tumbled towards. I was coming from my head back then, so I wasn’t in touch with what I felt, even though my higher self knew what was happening.
         These days, things are different. I come from my heart, and music moves me all the time. I’m letting it reach me once more. Actually, because my heart is so much more open now, it’s reaching me deeper and more often than ever. It’s really beautiful, but sometimes kind of disruptive. This extreme openness is still relatively new to me, and I try not to squelch it. Which means that it’s not unusual for me to start crying in the car when I hear a piece of music that moves me. Or air drumming in between sets at the gym. Or singing the song on the radio quietly, but audibly, in public. Or dancing in my bedroom. By myself. It feels good, hurts no one, and makes me happy. It may look (and sound) a little strange to those in my line of sight or in earshot, but it’s harmless. I’m even grateful for the tears, because it means I’m feeling something, when for so long I was unable to.
         Besides everything else it’s given me, music also serves as a barometer for how much I’m letting in, how much I’m letting out, how much I’m feeling. I table drum like mad now because the music is back in me. Even in my darkest moments, I can turn to music to help me. I’ve let her back in. She feels good. And if she feels that good to me, I feel that good to her. It’s a marvelous relationship.
         I’m forty-six, and I’ve never proposed to a woman. But I’ve been married for over thirty years. Married to music.


©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a loud screaming amplifier of Wrongs) Reserved.

Prescriptions For Disaster (part 2)

        During the tenure of my last relationship, I was coming out of the most painful period of my adult life. Nine months before I met principessa, my father died. I had also experienced a slew of other losses in a short period of time, which I’ve written about in this blog (you can read more about this by going to the category My Dark Ages).
         The pain from those losses was poisoning my mind, heart, and body. Instead of feeling all that pain, however, I anesthesized myself to it. I effectively wrote my own internal “prescriptions” that would numb me to the world of hurt living inside of me.
         I’m not blaming myself for why my relationship with principessa didn’t work. But I am owning my part of it. She had her own prescriptions, different than mine, but just as destructive. That’s usually how it works - when it doesn’t work. We each do the dance we’re used to. We each take the prescriptions we’ve written for ourselves. If we recognize what we’re doing, that we’re building walls instead of bridges, and want to do it differently, we can. If not, we just repeat old patterns. And sometimes even create some new ones.
         All these prescriptions were created and taken to avoid pain. Pain of the past. And the projected pain of the future, in the form of potential rejection and abandonment.
         So without further ado, here they are. Clint Piatelli’s personal Prescriptions For Disaster in his last relationship:

1) Shut down emotionally, as a reaction to a bludgeoning series of huge losses.

2) Go into depression. In other words, turn all that pain and anger back in on yourself.

3) Meet a beautiful woman, fall in love with her right away, but not know it because you’re on prescriptions one and two.

4) The more you feel, the more scared you get. Increase dosages of prescriptions one and two.

5) Hold onto your anger, but be ashamed of it. So instead of moving through you, the anger stays inside and keeps you perpetually frustrated. Then, once in a while, blow up.

6) Unconsciously say and do things to keep the woman you love from getting too close, all the while beating yourself up for not being able to fully express yourself. This self-sustaining cycle perpetually reinforces itself until you feel like there’s no way out. Occasionally consider jumping into on-coming traffic.

7) Let her know you’re sad, but never, ever, let her in on just how much you hate yourself. Because then she’ll leave you, you miserable lout, and then you’re really fucked. But keep hating yourself. It’s good for you.

8) Only let your intense passion for her come out in the bedroom. It’s safe for you there, because that’s the only place on you know who you are and what you want.

9) Unconsciously renew your vow never to fall too hard for a woman because of how badly you got burned from your first love. Tell yourself that love is like money. Always get just a little more than you give, that way you’ll never be in the red. Hide some away where nobody can find it too, in case there’s a run on the bank.

10) Operate at about 60% most of the time. That is, minimize everything, because it’s safer that way. Never let her see you too much of anything - including excited or happy - because that’s showing too much of yourself. And that’s dangerous. Besides, you’re no good anyway.

         Some of those prescriptions I’d been on in other relationships, and others were unique to this last one. But I had never been on so many, or taken them as much. That’s because of where I was at in my life. And because of how deeply I felt for her, and therefore how positively petrified I was. I actually invented prescriptions (without consultation, mind you) because whatever I was on wasn’t enough. She kept touching me, and when I started to feel too much, I reacted by either increasing the dose of something I was already on or just creating a new prescription from scratch. I was like a mad scientist, concocting all sorts of noxious, dangerous chemicals in the labs of my psyche just so that I wouldn’t get hurt.
        Eventually, after she broke my heart, I opened up. I fired that crazy chemist inside of me who was doping me up to keep me from feeling. Thank god. That guy was killing me.

©2009 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and another medicine cabinet full of Wrongs) Reserved