stop sabotaging my own happiness

It’s a drunk thing, something we all do to ourselves. Not everybody does it to the same extent – some people have higher bottoms than others – but we all do it.

I am only 3 weeks sober – real sober, not the “I don’t need any help” dry drunk kind I’ve done before – but the kind that comes with a modicum of clarity. I have manufactured drama and misery and have taken people down with me.

Drunks are only happy when everyone else is miserable, and even then we need to be miserable too.

I am in love with the woman of my dreams- the one I should have been looking for all along.

I have plans for the future. I may drag my feet sometimes, but I look to the future and I see light, not darkness.

I look at my troubles, and I see them as rolling hills, not insurmountable peaks.

I now know happiness, and it is good.

Things are going well for me these days. I am in a relationship with a wonderful woman. I have been taking the baby steps to get my finances back in order. I have optimism for the first time in months. I feel like all the crap my ex-wife was trying to shove down my throat has finally been purged from my system.

I know I’ve said this before, but I think the dark days are behind me.

I have come to understand part of what was holding me back. I was self-destructing because I was afraid of acknowledging something about myself, but I understand it now, and I accept.

I am bisexual.

And everyone around me says that my self-destructive behaviors have slowed to a crawl.

For the first time in months, I am happy. Now, try not to think of an elephant- instead of focusing on the sabotage, I will focus what I need to do next to sustain the happiness.

Small changes….

So the other day, I wrote about the worst year of my life was nearing it’s conclusion with the coming anniversary of my father’s passing. I forget that the fickle finger of fate had the 51st week yet to pass.

On the way home from work Friday, there was a grinding, gnashing, groaning noise, followed by violent turbulence and a puff of white smoke. Now, all those things indicate one of two things: 1) we have a new Pope, or 2) my transmission blowed up.

We don’t have a new Pope. I checked.

So- anybody know anybody with an extra car I can bum, or perhaps that is selling a car cheap? My car moves, and if I had a five mile commute or so I’d risk it for a week or two. I, however, have a 40 mile commute each way. I don’t want to have Amish buggies clippity-clop past my smoking Volvo shouting “get a horse” at me in High German.

Fortunately, I have stopped feeling cursed, stopped feeling angry, stopped feeling like my life is out of my hands. Sometimes, you just have to laugh.

In a week, the worst year of my life will officially come to a close. On September 29, 2005, my father passed away. The next twelve months saw me have surgery on my manparts, separate from my wife, learn how to live on my own, go broke, , lose my car in a flood, and go (nearly) crazy. Today, I am finally beginning to see that it was all worth it.

I am ready to move forward.

My meds have been tweaked. I have been happy, productive, and generally doing good stuff ever since.

What the hell is wrong with me?!?

It’s time to get naked. Completely starkers. Because that may be the only I ever get to figure myself out. I make the same mistake over and over and over, and I seem genuinely surprised whenever it happens.

Because the last time was the last time. As was the time before that.

And here I stand, cloaked in my false superiority, a knight in tarnished armor, tilting at windmills with the full knowledge that they are only windmills.

What happened to me, or perhaps didn’t happen to me, that makes me such a self-deluded psychological mess, afraid of happiness and seeing to it that I never get happy.

I try to blame it on disorders and pathologies and personality types. It might just be that I am lazy.

And afraid.

It all comes back to fear. Fear of my emotions, fear of rejection, fear of an ordinary life.

FACT: I used to be fat; 400 pounds, in fact. All anyone ever saw was a fat kid. Not the thinker or writer, not the oddly sensitive man who cries every time he watches A Charlie Brown Christmas, not the cutting edge wit, not the IQ in the 99.7th percentile. They only saw the fat.

I am not so fat anymore. After years of failure, I had a gastric bypass and lost between 160 and 180 pounds. That was four years ago, but I still think like the fat kid, who will be despised simply for the size of his waist. I still think like the kid who will be picked last for kickball. I still think like the kid who will not get the girl, who will be mocked, who will be the object of derision, or worse yet- indifference.

I expect people to hate me. So I make them hate me. On the whole, not such a bad outcome, because they will hate me on my terms, and because I was proven right.

I love to be right. I need to be right. I may have been fat, but they were wrong. And proven wrong by a fat kid. You may not know this, but there are many people who think that fat people are stupid, simply because they are fat.

FACT: I do, in fact, have some kind of thing in my head. The more I think about the diagnosis of Bipolar II, the more I think it is wrong. I think the ADHD is more accurate, because I don’t make my biggest mistakes- my worst, most impulsive decisions while excited. I make them while depressed and alone.

Excited and alone? I might go out for a drink and be chatty. I might play golf or let the dishes pile up because I am too busy with my PlayStation. I get distracted and I follow my impulses down the road to irresponibility. Excited I am a generally agreeable and spontaneous fellow.

What have I done while depressed and alone? I have bought a car without my wife’s permission. I have engaged in activity that was foolish, costly, and perverse (although technically not soliciting prostitutes- these people were, in fact, prostitutes, but I didn’t have enough money for that). I have gone on eating binges. I have drunk myself blind and driven home.

Note also that the other common feature of my fuckups great and small is that I was alone. Solitude is good, but loneliness is a disease that eats into your soul, your mind, and in my case, my wallet.

FACT: My personality doesn’t help matters. On the Meyers-Briggs Scale, I am an ENTP, the Inventor. Rational but visionary, quick-witted but short-tempered, capable of envisioning a million new way to attack an old problem but incapable of seeing people we perceive as not up to our level as insufferable. We hate old ways, authority, and convention.

On the other hand, my relationship profile is the Manchild, which in the frighteningly accurate terminology created by OKCupid.com, makes me a R*andom *Brutal L*ove *Dreamer- an immature, shoot from the hip romantic (in the metaphysical sense of the word primarily).

Taken together, it makes me a difficult person to deal with, or if you have the great misfortune to be the object of my affections, to love. I am so capable of greatness, but too often it goes over the heads of even very smart people. So they can’t keep up- fuck ‘em! That’s their problem.

SO WHAT DOES THIS ALL MEAN? It means I have a lot of work to do. I means I have to listen to the part of my brain that knows when an idea is bad. It means I have to trust people, and respect their feelings.

That last part is going to be the hardest, because I don’t always recognize that people even have feelings. Lord knows I’ve hurt them enough. Nevertheless, that is the most important thing. If I don’t stop hurting people, I will only hurt myself.

One should learn from one’s own mistakes. Me? I make them over and over again.

Without going into much detail, I was kind of on the verge of becoming happy. I was making life changes, I was getting my house in order (literally and figuratively), I was kinda developing a connection with a ladyfriend….

Naturally, I go and fuck that up.

What I did? Not relevant. Suffice it to say that there was a not insubstantial bit of begging for forgiveness. The point is, I did what I did knowing that I shouldn’t do it- or talk about it later.

The people who know me best all agree that I am smart and funny, but also sweet and kind and sincere. The face I show to the world is combative, asshole, sarcastic fuckup.

Why? I’m not entirely sure why. That I do it? Oh, yeah, I am 100% sure of that.