Postcard from an Unraveling

I’ve been struggling lately.

There is no other way to put it.

I’ve written and rewritten those opening lines, these first paragraphs, this entire piece, a half-dozen times. I’ve started and stopped and started over. I’ve labored through openings, half-drafts, and efforts that got within sight of the finish line and then just… not been able to get them there.

Nothing has come easy lately. Not my life. Not sleep. Not much of anything. I have been struggling. Mightily. Not just with writing but with everything, and therefore with writing too.

I’ve labored at finishing a version of this on and off all day. It is now 2:00 in the morning. The draft I have been working on runs nearly 6,000 words yet feels some unmanageable amount of editing away from being done. I am too exhausted to even try, so I am starting over… and maybe that’s a good thing.

Fatigue has a way of stripping things of their petty decorations, their clever unnecessaries. People sometimes best reveal the things that haunt them when they are too tired to get up and shut the closet. Maybe dead-tired is exactly the right state to be in to write this; and maybe the dead of night is exactly the right time to begin confessing it all to you.

I have been going through a protracted, painful, double-unraveling these past few months.

The first was an unraveling of me. The second was an unraveling by me. 

I came undone; and then had to unravel why I had.

The first, my own unraveling, was the result of a tangled jumble of things coming to a head all at the same time and all at 100 miles per hour. With them came pain, anxiety, and stress, all of which steadily worsened. I took it until I couldn’t take it, and then had no choice but to pour myself fully into addressing it.

I got knocked pretty flat and then had to find my way back to my feet. It has been a climb that began on my back.

While the worst of it is now behind me and the weight has lifted significantly, it hasn’t entirely. I’m mending but not yet restored – and even that amount of progress is a welcome relief. That is one of the ironies of hard stretches: when you tumble all the way down to the bottom of a canyon and then have to climb your way back out, the exact same point halfway between floor and rim sure feels a whole lot different than when you were headed in the other direction.

Halfway up sure beats halfway down.

At present, I actually feel relatively good all things considered – though relatively is doing some heavy lifting there. It isn’t that I am where I want to be or am soon to arrive there - I have some significant personal work ahead of me - but it is necessary and important and for my betterment. I’m just not laid out on my back in a dizzy emotional swoon with stars circling my head like you see in a cartoon.

I’m not trying to be vague or roundabout about what the issues were. There will be time to explain what bowled me over. For now though, it’s enough for our immediate purposes to just know tell you that it was more internal, emotional, rather than traumatic… although its roots were in traumas both recent and past.

No one’s life, health, or safety was at risk or is now. There is no need to worry about my wellbeing or the wellbeing of anyone in my life. Sometimes storms are just emotional – and sometimes they form in bunches and then barrel toward you at the same time while you remain unaware they exist let alone that they are all tracking toward a simultaneous arrival and, therefore, a collision right over your roof.

That is a fairly solid metaphor for what has happened these last few months.

A confluence of things just descended on me and then worked me over. It was a perfect storm of perfect emotional storms, a turducken of hostile weather. It was a tornado wrapped in a hurricane wrapped in a typhoon.

The winds began to stir in March and had reached a gale by June. By July, the gale had strengthened to a tropical storm which knocked me around in a way that I wasn’t prepared for at all.

By August, it had become a hurricane which left me feeling beaten up in a way I haven’t before.

There is only one other stretch in my life that has ever come close.

In 2010, my life as I knew it all but burned to the ground in a stunningly rapid series of tragedies and transitions. Three people I cared about died. I separated from my then wife – and thereby lost the family by marriage that I had been closer with than much of my own. My business partner went under and took my income with it.

Every corner of my life just combusted almost all at once and there was no putting out any of it. I went from being a married, well-employed father with a stable family life to being a single dad with a two-year old, a shattered family, bills to pay, and no income… in the space of *four months*.

I have often called that stretch my ‘Year of the Phoenix’. These past few months, in a way, have been a phoenix cycle of their own. The start of one, half of one. Overall, phoenix cycles are a constructive destruction, a burning down so as to enable a renewal. It is the burning down that both comes first and sucks tremendously.

This time through the cycle was similar to the first in its general soul-wearying consumption of emotional fuel, but there were some differences between the two:

1) In 2010, the catalysts centered mostly on people around me. This time, the catalysts all involved me directly or were solely about me.

2) In 2010, the catalysts were tangible, observable events, traumas, and tragedies. This time they were more like nudges that toppled a sequence of dominos which resurfaced some past traumas and what I still carry from them.

3) Last time around, *everyone close to me* was in the middle of an emotional hurricane. I was in the middle of several, but everyone else was engulfed by at least one of them. This time around, I’ve been going through several at once and nearly entirely on my own.

I saw none of them coming and didn’t detect them until they were all pulling shingles off the roof. The storms in 2010 were more severe in terms of tangible impact to lives and life as I knew it. Still, I weathered the recent storms far more uncomfortably, far more painfully, than the ones in what had been a far worse period.

There is a reason for that. In 2010, I was shielded – albeit dysfunctionally – by two unhealthy remnants from my childhood. The two go hand in hand and relate to how I react to a crisis. When the shit hits the fan, I reflexively pivot into a sort of firefighting mode where I focus nearly exclusively on attending to other people impacted by the crisis, and pay almost no attention whatsoever to how the crisis is impacting me.

Both are residuals of a childhood spent in a household where I needed someone else to be okay before I could be. The someone was my depressive, alcoholic father. My paired autonomous response to a crisis is a product of dysfunction that became so practiced, it just wired in place until it was simply how I functioned.

When I was a kid, my father’s drinking was the one thing that determined how a day was going to go; and that drinking correlated to how depressed he was. There was at least some possibility of being able to impact the trajectory of a day, but it was only successful a fraction of the time - and was only possible at all if some distraction to get us out of the house was thrown out there at the first whiff of foreboding well before the first whiff of an open beer. My sister and I needed to not only monitor the weather, we needed to divine the forecast.

With my father and his drinking being the center of the world, rather than focus on myself - my wants, needs, feelings, I focused on him and his. I read the room rather than read my own diary - because it wasn’t my own writing I had to worry about; it was the writing on the wall.

In that kind of dynamic, you direct so much of your focus and energy toward reading the other person, it doesn’t even occur to you to put energy into an internal diary of your own. After all, who would read it? Not even you.

You just become so accustomed to monitoring other people’s emotional dashboards, even your own being lit up like a Christmas tree doesn’t register let alone command your attention. You simply don’t notice, or you pay it no heed if by chance you do.

Monitoring other people’s radars though… hoo-boy… that you hone into a precision instrument that runs so lightning-fast and with a sensitivity so acute, it seems almost like ESP at times. You know things before you know why you do. You just do.

A few months ago, Valerie was on the road hopping from city to city doing a series of events. After one of them, she called me from the car. That wasn’t unusual. She usually did. In fact, it had practically become the unofficial routine at that point. She would do an event and then be done for the day. She would be ready to exhale and would need to decompress; I’d be interested in hearing all about it.

So, when she called that day, I picked up quickly with the “Hi.” of someone who had been expecting the call; and she replied with the quick “Hi” of someone who knew I would be… and then, without thought or pause, almost autonomously, I said “What’s wrong?”

The question startled her. It took her aback for a second. It turns out she had been through a rough day but hadn’t really even processed it or whether to tell me about it yet. She had just called intending to put it aside and had then gotten no farther than “Hi.”

We then talked about her day and mine too, but even after we had, she was still a bit thrown by the speed of my emotional radar – I was too, to be honest.

“I… didn’t even say anything. How did you… know that?”

“I don’t know. I just did. I heard it in the silence.”

She had said one word – “Hi.” – and in a tone that wasn’t noticeably different than normal.

My outward-facing radar is just ACUTE.

When a crisis hits and I reflexively flip into fireman mode, its sensitivity gets cranked up even higher and with me on heightened alert, I register every blip… without trying to do so. Without thinking about it. It is just how my crisis mode works. I can’t not.

By contrast, my attentiveness to what is going on within me internally borders on nonexistent. Per the above, it was so eclipsed in importance by the need to monitor my father when I was a kid, at this point, I forget that I even have an internal dashboard half the time. I do have one though; we all do.

We all have a bodily reporting system that is continuously providing indirect feedback on what we are being subjected to or are subjecting ourselves to in our current lives. I say ‘indirect feedback’ because our bodies don’t report back on the external stimuli; they report back on how those stimuli are affecting us. Our bodies don’t know the difference between a tiger and a presentation to your boss. They absolutely know that both stress you right the hell out. They know when that’s costing you sleep, making you skip meals, and filling the void by eating you up inside.

Our bodies tell the story, our story.

Even when we pay little attention to it ourselves, our bodies let us know how we are doing in a voice that goes from a whisper when all is well to a full-throated shout when we should be concerned about how something is affecting us and need to make immediate changes. We are supposed to listen.

I have never listened.

That wasn’t a problem right up until it was.

[Continued in Part 2.]