Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

“Try to hold you in bed you shrug away instead oh I don’t know why.” I found this song during a recent transition, and it’s stayed with me since. It fits so many moods — contentment, sadness, lonliness, morning, mourning, and moulting.

In a way, I’m forcing myself grow and improve, and this scares me. In the book my therapist recommended, it explains “Change requires willingness to experience pain”, and I’m going through this exactly. I’m constantly stepping out of my comfort zone, and at this point, it’s much more trepidation than excitement. It’d be so much easier to fall into old mental habits, as unhealthy as they are.

On mornings like this, I sit in my living room with the curtains open. It makes me self-conscious to be sitting there with houses across the street getting a clear view of me in my PJs and mussed up hair. But it reminds me that someone else is out there. That the world is full of life, and vibrancy, and people just like me.

Continue reading

As I was writing notes for therapy tomorrow¹, I was doing some research on lifetraps and came across a short paragraph that cleared up everything for me to the point where I didn’t feel like I needed to keep my appointment. It was the answer I didn’t even know I was looking for.

Now the feeling of emptiness that’s followed me for so long is gone, and everything makes sense. I feel stable again, though there’s still a hint of doubt because I’ve been here before but it’s never been anything permanent.

I’m still going tomorrow so I can solidify my new-found understanding. I don’t think it’s going to be a regular thing again, I just need the bit of guidance he gives me that lets me fix myself. I can’t explain how good it felt to make the appointment, knowing I had someone with a professional education and years of experience in this to give me an objective view. My friends are always there to support me, but they don’t make sense of the world for me the way my therapist does.

1. This is the first time I’ll be bringing notes, only because I’m trying to cover such a complex topic that I want to be sure I’m not missing anything. [↑]

(+5 bonus points if you get the album reference.)

I really do have love to give! I just don’t know where to put it!

—Quiz Kid Donnie Smith, Magnolia

Okay, I’ll admit it.

I need to love. I need it, the way I need to eat.

This is the same part of me that notices the faint outlines of hearts drawn in car windows. Also, the same part that marvels about that adolescent point in life, when one would draw something so simple and insignificant because the only worry was whether or not someone liked you back.

So when I don’t have someone to love, it fucking kills me.

You know it sucks, realizing that everything you believed in is complete bullshit.

—Some guy sitting on a bench in some movie

This is how I’ve been feeling lately. I’ve lost the plot. I’m wandering and wondering. Aimless. Floating. Disconnected. Questioning what it’s all for.

It’s not that I haven’t been able to keep myself occupied. My calendar until March is quite busy actually. But I feel like a spectre, floating through the world; ethereal, immaterial, intangible, and unable to be touched or affected by anything.

On the other hand, music is hitting me pretty hard right now. I tend to dance a lot, mostly in my room. I actually recorded myself dancing to see what it looks like. I can only imagine that it’s on the same level of embarrassment as getting caught masturbating to furries (yep, there’s a porn for that) with bean dip smeared on my chest.

I’m in a No Motiv state-of-mind; that strange period between Jacky and Louise, when I was living on Island Park with Trolley, and we would go for car rides in the summer to Diagram for Healing. But it’s And The Sadness Prevails that I’m rediscovering, hearing the songs from a different point in my life very different from when I last gave the album a thorough listen.

When John asks me how my day was, it seems like my answer is always somewhere between “shitty” and “like someone took a giant shit on my face¹”. And when he asks what happened, I can never give him a specific incident. It’s just this depression, this sagging feeling that’s been weighing so heavily on me, because I haven’t been able to let go as easily as I’d like.

I’m trying to find my footing in the Tao Te Ching. Verse 44 in particular is speaking to me right now:

One’s own reputation — why the fuss?
One’s own wealth — why the concern?
I say, what you gain is more trouble than what you lose
Love is the fruit of sacrifice
Wealth is the fruit of generosity
Be content, rest in your own fullness —
You will not suffer from loss
You’ll avoid the snare of this world
You’ll have long life and endless blessings

The transition continues.

1. I should postscript this with a note that I wouldn’t enjoy this [↑]

This week I’ve been seeing images when I wake up in the middle of the night. Usually in the form of slow, flesh ripping decapitation, or bullets entering non-vital parts of my body, like my arms. Not of self-mutilation but mutilation of the self. These images, in some form or another, have followed me my whole life, and went away after I started therapy¹. Now they’re back.

There’s been a new one lately though.

I have a one-inch thick, two meter pole through the heart, sticking out perpendicularly to my body in both directions evenly. My heart and lungs have grown and healed around this pole, and even a gentle impact on either end, due to the mechanical-force multiplying nature of the fulcrum that is my heart, could disrupt my organs and kill me.

So as I’m trying to fall asleep again, I see myself going about any regular day, stumbling around with this unwieldy pole, hoping I don’t trip, and no one bumps into it.

1. Or perhaps, co-incidentally from something/someone else. [↑]

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(This first. Listen to the clarity of the lower octave notes that Regina adds in waves and waves at the end of the chorus; you can tell it’s a quality grand piano just from how those notes resonate — an upright would sound much muddier at the low end. This is the song that plays on day (408) and it’s fucking perfect. Also, title from the lyrics.¹)

It would appear that someone made a movie of my last relationship, and (500) Days of Summer is to #8 as Eternal Sunshine was to #4. The interesting part is that it was released early last year, during the relationship, and I wonder if it would have changed anything on my end, had I seen it then. And if she saw it now, would she understand things from my perspective? Or does she understand already? And if other people saw it, would they understand how one could unwittingly get their hopes up when things are so clear from the beginning?

I’m so glad Marc Webb, the director, treated the material with such grace. You can tell it was based on experience because the tender moments come from a real place (co-writer Scott Neustadter admitted Summer was based on a girl who “returned his kisses but not his ardor”). In an interview, Joseph Gordon-Levitt said, “I’ve had my heart broken before. Truly, truly broken. But when I look back at me in my heartbroken phase, it’s pretty hilarious, because it felt so much more extreme than it really was. One of the things I love about (500) Days of Summer is that it doesn’t make light of what we go through in romances [emphasis mine], but it is honest about it and shows it for what it is, which is often profoundly funny”, and I completely agree. I also appreciate the fact that they don’t villainize Summer because she never takes advantage of Tom², and at the same time, it doesn’t make the agonizing days he goes through any less significant or difficult. In a profound way, it brings justification to everything I was (or am) going through. I suppose I’m just waiting for the punchline.

Hah.

Watching it has left me feeling emotionally devastated lately, almost as if I’ve regressed, and lost months of progress. John says it’s because seeing it was like seeing her again, reliving the entire thing from day one, from when we had met in the office. Like a recovering alcoholic falling off the wagon and taking his first sip in 5 years. That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the message, and as well as the recommendation to watch the movie from Darren.

Even though I’ve tried to completely forget and move on, I’ve come to learn it’s not that easy. It’s almost as if you have to accept the all the memories, both good and bad, as much as you accept your own qualities and flaws.

The days, months, years you spend with someone significant will inevitably change and shape you. To deny them is to deny yourself.

I found it fascinating to trace the plot developments to parts of my own story. The entries I’ve written over the last two years echo the sentiments so strikingly in dialogue, songs, and voice-overs.

This is a story of boy meets girl. The boy, Tom Hansen, of Margate, New Jersey, grew up believing that he’d never truly be happy until the day he met “the one”.

From my entry The Penultimate Letter — “My whole life, I looked for someone like you. Someone who was capable of raising me to my potential, someone who was worthy of the love I have to offer. But even then, I never knew I was capable of a love that resonated so deeply in my person.”

Continue reading

1. Or is it? [↑]
2. Ironically, the gender roles are reversed, and it’s Tom’s date who’s the voice of reason here. [↑]

I used to be a crier. Any strong emotion, good or bad (though more often the latter), could bring on tears like a reflex. Now, I can’t remember the last time I cried, which means it’s been a while. More than a year, I suspect.

Getting misty-eyed doesn’t count; that’s too easy. A poignant scene in a movie, the right song at the right moment, even seeing someone demonstrate a Tai Chi movement with masterly detail and precision can cause my heart to swell, but the feeling only lasts as long as a few blinks after the blurred vision. When I refer to crying, I mean when the tears are enough to overflow and leak.

When I was young, the kids in school would laugh at boys who cried — much less socially acceptable in this culture — but I was never embarrassed about it. I thought it was natural, the way some people are gay or Caucasian. I thought I’d grow out of it, the way one grows out of a fear of the dark gradually and subconsciously, but I kept crying well into my 20s.

I’ve always wondered if my dad has ever cried, even as a child. I can’t picture him doing it, not even when my grandmother dies. He’s so carefree and logical that I can’t see anything affecting him emotionally. With my dad as my early model for a man, I’m sure this is part of the reason I don’t feel like an adult yet. Society teaches us that adults, or male one’s at least, aren’t supposed to cry.

I’m not sure why it’s been so long for me. Maybe the therapy, combined with my study of Taoism, has evened out my ups and downs, helping me acknowledge my weaknesses (so I’m not as hard on myself), as well as the uncontrollable nature of life. Maybe my life is stable enough now that I didn’t need that kind of release.

I turn 30 in 10 months, and I wonder when I’ll cry again.

The Turning 30 Series

• 29: The Child
• 29 1/12: The Adolescent
• 29 3/12: The Loved
• 29 2/12: The Lachrymologist

Lisa’s recent comment, where she says that someone who’s able to teach you a lot sex could make up for unflattering characteristics like closed-mindedness, got me thinking.

I know what I like, sexually. As a guy, I’ve probably seen it all, especially after being unable to look away at the train wrecks on eFukt, a site with the tagline “Porn you wish you never saw”¹. If I had to make a guestimate, I’d say that my sexual deviancy is about average; I’m far from vanilla, but on the other hand, I don’t get aroused at watching Japanese women taking enemas of yellow liquid, shitting it onto heated pans, and having a group of people eat the cooked concoction².

At the same time, I’m far from having explored everything in the bedroom, mostly because I’ve never reached the right level of intimacy. It’s not that I’m embarrassed; they’re just things I want to share with someone special — the way some female pornstars share anal sex with only their boyfriends, or some women save it for marriage — and no one has been that special yet. That, and the fact my sex life has never become so boring that I felt like I needed to change things up. Besides, secrets aren’t so bad; the fun is gone when when all the secrets are out and there’s no mystery left. But even though I haven’t explored these things yet doesn’t mean I don’t know what I like, and I’m pretty sure that’s mostly been determined already.

The last sexual thing to blow my mind was when I dated Louise and she introduced me to the whole Dominant/submissive subculture, of which I had previously been completely unaware. As with a few other carnal flavours, it’s something I’d like to try with another partner in the future, but probably only on a contract basis because being a permanent dom³ is too much for me. That was back in 2004, and there hasn’t been anything quite as erotically eye-opening since. Maybe because it was something mentally sexual, not just a physical button to be pushed in a different way.

It feels like there’s little new to learn about my sexual tastes now. It makes me wonder what’s left out there for someone to teach me (I mean, aside from learning the preferences of the person you’re having sex with), or for me to discover. Then again, just last week, I read a news article on a subject of an indirectly sexual nature, and one part had me thinking, “Wow, that would be pretty hot”, when it was a very innocuous thing that I’m sure most people wouldn’t even think twice about, so who knows.

1. I’m not going to put a link from my page, you can just google it. WARNING: VERY, VERY NOT SAFE FOR WORK. And possibility, sanity [↑]
2. I didn’t have the stomach to watch the video, but John did, and he generously gave me a play-by-play of it as I pretended to be involved in his movie collection to distract myself from the grossness. I remember him saying, “Now they’re blowing on it because it’s too hot to eat” and realizing he was actually watching the video and not just making it up. [↑]
3. i.e. 100% of the time. I find I’m generally dominant 95% of the time in my relationships. [↑]

When I was dating Louise, and we talked about our exes, she told me one of hers was going to be a diplomat, and they broke up because she knew she wasn’t meant to be a diplomat’s wife. I understood. By marrying into certain careers, you marry into those responsibilities as well, and they can be too much for some, me included.

So she was with me. I wasn’t bound for greatness like that.

Still, it made me wonder; what was I meant for? What did she see in me?

I know I wasn’t meant to changed the world.

But I still think I was meant to affect the lives of others. I was born for greatness of my own, as small as it may be.

I can’t wait until the Christmas holidays. I’ll have a chance to work on projects I’ve put on hold to make time for paid work. A chance to breathe. A chance to do nothing. Some serious me time, inside my warm house, watching a movie while wrapped in blankets. Lazy maple bacon every day, hermitizing. I may even decide to go home and visit people I always mean to see when I’m in Toronto, but never have a chance to.

I’m busy with side-work until the new year, and currently not accepting new work. On the social end, I’ve come to a point where I’m not only booked, but double-booked, and find myself having to prioritize plans and decide what I’d rather do. It’s been great for keeping my brain busy, and whereas I’d normally feel overstimulated, I’m now reveling in all these awesome experiences and people I get to meet.

This doesn’t feel like a transition phase, as the transition, or whatever the hell it is, already happened weeks ago. I was at fork in the road, and now that I’ve taken the first steps, I find myself on a one-way path through a tunnel without any exits, wondering what’s on the other end.

(I love these entries.)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

First: listen to this. Some days I feel exactly like this song. Those days are pretty good.

I remember reading the blog once of the guy who said that his aunt was Nancy. She was a Canadian woman who suffered from mental instability and killed herself (“It seems so long ago/Nancy was alone/a forty five beside her head/an open telephone”), and Cohen read about the story in the newspaper, and penned this song about her.

Anyway.

I like him. He’s very unbiased. He doesn’t try to coddle me or side with or against me or force me into thinking anything. He offers perspectives that no one else can give me.

I wasn’t sure where to start, so I just tried to bring him up to speed on my life in the time that passed between us. It began briefly with how well I was maintaining the progress we had made but quickly drifted to the relationship, and that pretty much took the rest of the session.

(From here on out, I’m going to refer to it as the relationship. Just cause I’m tired of writing “half-relationship” or “relationship” in quotes like that. I’d say that two people as involved as we were would certainly be considered to be in a relationship.)

Continue reading

(Thank you, Rachel, for giving me yet another title)

I’m going through a sort of re-evaluation phase right now. I’ve been feeling peaceful and serene, maybe because things have been going well lately, so I’m left trying to figure out what I really want. Whether I can sustain this happiness, and how. What is important to my existence and survival.

I have an appointment with my therapist in three days. I haven’t seen him in over a year, but it doesn’t seem like that long ago. He says he still remembers me and remembers where my file is in his cabinet. I’m glad we didn’t sacrifice our patient-doctor relationship for a friendship (as I asked him about once) cause otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to see him like this, and I’d be trying to find another therapist. Instead of feeling like I need to be fixed this time, I’m just wondering where I go from here. A follow-up appointment of sorts, that my work is covering through the health plan.

I suppose the reason I want to talk to him is really that I need to hear myself talk, and I generally don’t talk to anyone about this stuff. Probably because I don’t know what the hell I’d be saying. John’s the first person I turn to when I seek guidance, but conversations with him are somewhat forced because he’s terrible on the phone. He needs to talk for a reason or purpose, and I could never explain this feeling to him. My therapist, on the other hand, has always given me a guiding hand, pointing me in the right direction so that I can start to figure things out on my own.

I have a feeling this long-weekend, while mostly spent alone in my house, will go by sooner than I’d like. My artistic endeavors have taken a back seat to paying-work lately, and now I have the chance to spend some time doing what I want, for me.