Square One, again

I have a problem.

It has been building for nearly a year. It isn’t a matter of life or death, but it was ruinous of my entire week.

What I should have been doing this week was talking to you good people, writing something to tell you how deeply, profoundly affected I was by people’s kindness after my “I am returning” post last week. You should have heard about my overwhelming gratitude by now.

I should have gotten back to people who kindly sent me private messages.

I should have gotten messages out to paid subscribers telling them know how grateful I am for them being so undeservedly loyal… and gotten messages out to people who dropped paid subscriptions telling them how grateful I am for their having ever supported me at all.

And I should have posted a real piece here instead of this one.

It should have been the one I’ve been working on about an old military footlocker I came across and the story it has to tell about a soldier, a life, choices of character, and a long road that leads all the way to me,

[Y’all… I have so much heart for this one. It may end up being one of my favorite things I’ve ever written here… as soon as I finish it… which I didn’t this week.]

Instead, I spent the week in an extremely high-stress scramble trying to manage the wreckage left behind in the wake of the situation that knocked me flat in February.

It was a horrible week. I had raging real-life fires to put out, but what burned was purely emotional:

I’m right back where I was two years ago. And eight years ago. And fifteen.

For the first time in a decade and a half, I was actually about to reach the finish line of “If I can just get through this it’ll get better. If I can just get through _____.”

The next two weeks. The next six months. This one crisis. This last fire.

I thought I was actually going to get there this time.

In November, something worked out for me. Something good happened. I got a lucky break in a situation where I had previously gotten one bad break after another.

I found a new place for my son and me.

An apartment. A cute little place that is just right for us. Nothing fancy. Two bedrooms, one bathroom. But it has good floors and good light. On winter afternoons, the sun comes streaming in through the craftsman stained glass in the dining room and fills the place with a warmth beyond the heat.

It’s not the Taj Mahal, but to me it just as well could be.

Getting it was monumental to me.

With a signature, I had my life back. I had recovered the last of my major losses from when my life burned down. I had buried the last of my traumas unhealed: having almost lost my house in a wrongful foreclosure action and having then been forced to sell it anyway despite ‘winning’.

Fifteen years after it began, I was finally going to close a long, brutal chapter.

Finally.

Every last “If I can just get through ____” …

…I had gotten through them all.

Finally.

Now, six months later, I’ve had all of that stolen right out from under me. I was at the finish line. Now I am right back at the start.

Again.

That apartment that was supposed to be the poignant arrival at a place I had come so very far to reach is now a not-so-new place that I’ve barely inhabited. The little breakfast nook still doesn’t have a table. Framed pictures still sit exactly where they were three months ago: leaning up against the walls where they should have been hung by now.

The place is furnished… enough… but all around me are the ghosts of ‘what was about to be’ haunting the places where they were abandoned.

The upstairs, with all of its space for a den to watch games with my son in his last year before college, is still empty save for a few empty boxes. The place under the dormer I was going to turn into a spot to sit and write is just a place under a dormer with nothing in it.

I should be both happily halfway through a first lease and well into a new chapter so very long in coming right now.

I should be coming home to a place finished in the making of it into one.

I should feel like I’ve lived here from solstice to equinox to solstice. From winter to spring and now into summer. Instead, I feel like I’ve barely resided and never really inhabited.

All of the things I wanted to do aren’t even undone items on a list that at least exists. They aren’t even things that cross my mind, because in their place is an obligation which sharply increased my expenses… which I took on not knowing that what had already been a six-month pummeling was about to turn into a full-on curb-stomp in a matter of weeks.

And all of that… all of those losses in a place where I was finally about to close a decade and a half of them… were because of how someone chose to treat me and the impact it had on me.

And a pummeling that had me already feeling battered by last August, I can’t even talk about it.

Not really.

Not in any real way.

I can’t even explain why I can’t talk about it.

I can’t even tell my own story.

All I can do is say something vague and leave it at that.

In February, I didn’t have a breakdown. I suffered the last blows of what had been a long beatdown. I had been getting the shit kicked out of me for a very long time. It had often taken place in public but in a way that the audience would not detect.

It had happened in plain sight... and nobody had seen a thing… and that had been entirely by design.

Over a span of months, someone treated me with such abject cruelty, it felt like torture. In February, they told me – flatly and without apology - that their battering treatment: 1) had been on purpose and meant to hurt me; 2) had given them satisfaction; 3) had been driven by something they had only imagined; and 4) had only stopped when they saw how entirely shattered I was and realized… I had just loved them the whole time… and they had been brutally horrible to me… for no reason at all.

I hadn’t done anything at all. I hadn’t deserved any of it.

A human being had gotten to a place where they: 1) developed an entirely imagined, false belief about someone; 2) maintained an active malice based on that false belief for months; 3) acted upon it over and over to hurt that person on purpose; and then 4) watched that person suffer, twist, stop writing, lose a quarter of their income - and tell them so…

and they still kept on treating them that way… for no reason. Over myth in their mind… which was driven by their own insecurities.

A week after this person told me all of that, they did something even worse but with the same formula. They imagined a nonexistent slight; acted to hurt me as badly as possible on purpose; and did it for no actual reason at all.

There are a number of reasons why I can’t say more – or won’t.

Very high among them: an empathy and compassion for someone who has none for me.

This person openly told me that caring about how they hurt me feels bad while hurting me more actually makes them feel better.

I have compassion for them anyway.

So much so, that I have kept the way they treated me and the things they did a secret.

They’ve demonstrated no remorse. They’ve displayed no conscience about their behavior. They’ve angled for sympathy from the very same audience they manipulated into unwittingly applauding things that were actually malicious public knifings intended to hurt someone in front of an audience. They’ve shown nothing resembling a stirring of regret.

I have compassion for them anyway.

I got the absolute shit beat out of me by someone who fully admitted to having treated me that way.

It savaged my life, my mental health, my career.

And I need nothing from them.

I need nothing at all in repair.

I don’t need an apology for a long list of shockingly hurtful things.

I don’t need amends.

I don’t need atonement.

I don’t even need them to tell the truth to the public they’ve deceived since last July when they first erased all traces of me from their public life to conceal a lie told in their private life: that I no longer existed.

I need nothing.

They are a hurt person acting from a place of deep pain. They have both my empathy and my forgiveness. They have my compassion. They needn’t ever find any for me.

All I want is my life back.

I don’t even need all of it back.

I’d be happy with just enough of it back to not have to go through another round of excruciating financial PTSD like I did seven years ago.

I just want to be able to… live… write… be a father… be a person - and not just someone perpetually on fire or fighting one.

I just want to be able to just… exist.

I have been a writer for 2 ½ years. I have spent the last half under extreme duress. There isn’t a single thing I’ve written in the past year that wasn’t authored while trying to fight off a hurricane to find a big enough eye to write in.

Being able to sustain being a writer was hard enough as it was. Scratching and clawing to make progress was hard enough. The running beating I took over the past year wiped out all of it. Every last bit of progress. Everything I had worked for since launching this. Gone.

This past one year wiped out two.

And now I’m right back at Square One.

I’m starting all over right back where I was when I first jumped into this:

Making a plea to people to consider taking on paid subscriptions if that is within their means – and for no other reason than blind faith, kindness, or an interest in supporting someone who could use it.

Only this time, I’m making that plea at a time when this long table of ours already exists, already matters so very much to me, and I’ve done a shit job of servicing it.

I just want my life back... I don’t even need to reach the finish line I thought I had reached in December. I just want enough of it back to not have to start all over at the bottom. I’ve had to do that so many times. Please, not one more.

[And worst of all… I can’t even have this be a conversation. I have to close comments because of the subject matter. People are free to message me privately if of interest. The only caveats are that I won’t offer more detail than I have – and I’m already behind in getting back to people who deserved better.]