we build excitement

this journey is quite an exhausting one. i am finding more and more that i would far rather hike for days through rocky mountain national forest, lugging my own gear and food and sleeping wherever i find myself at night, than explore my own inner landscape. i fee like i'd be far less worn out.

each day, or at least each week, brings the discovery of yet another block i have placed onto the wall i have built around my inner self. i have written rules for my own behavior that keep me in check and don't allow the five-year-old inside me to run freely. i'm not speaking of my inner child as the term is commonly used, at least i don't believe i am. but down inside me is a little kid that never grew up because i didn't allow him to exist, so his growth was stunted and he's just now beginning to emerge. and he's an annoying little cuss.

i have found that i seem to have more in common with my elder son than i would ever have thought possible. caleb is relentlessly emotional, so completely ruled by his feelings at times that he literally cannot control what he does or how he responds, and as frustrating as that can be for me as his parent, i have always had a but of a grudging respect and even admiration for it. he can be so overwhelmed by his adoration for you that couldn't stop himself from hugging so impossibly hard that he uses ever fiber of muscle that he has. if he has his heart set on something that does not work out, it is the end of the world to him, not for selfish reasons necessarily but because he has invested himself so fully in that dream that it has become his reality, and something so simple as a friend not being able to play a particular afternoon is devastating to him on a level that would to most seem more appropriate for a death in the family. once upon a time i was like that. i can remember it. and it was not welcome.

and i started to build. i gathered block upon block and stacked them one on another, creating a wall that manufactured with each row a newer and deeper sense of stoicism, a dam to hold back that flood was so strong that it would take me over and not allow me to control my own reactions. those waters of whatever feelings i was having would wash over me and there nothing i could do to swim in them and force my direction. i would simply ride that tide, letting it take me where it would. it was easier, more natural, more accurate and more right, but it was unacceptable and would not work. so came the wall, and the wall has grown so very high.

but it has outlived its usefulness. i no longer live in the world that required that control, and the waters on the back side of that structure have risen to the point that the wall can no longer contain them and they spill over the top of it in subtle waves and splashes. for now. but there have come to be times when those splashes and waves become larger and pour over the edges in torrents, and it is impossible to hold back flowing water with nothing more than your hands. i find myself running back and forth, trying to gather the waters back up as they fall and toss them, press them, mash them or simply to hold them at the top, praying the spillage won't be too great.

but it is becoming greater than i can muster the energy to keep up with. i can longer run quickly enough, my hands are no longer large enough and i have run out of blocks to add to the wall, and the waters are seeping through my fingers or eluding my hands altogether and they have begun to pour over onto the ground around me and make their wet and difficult way into the world from which i had managed to isolate them.

it is a weird and terrifying experience to know that at any moment i could break into tears or unexpected laughter. i don't believe myself unstable, but it feels that way to me because i'm simply not accustomed to it. random moments of beauty can overwhelm me, moments of sadness can become unbearably poignant, moments of disappointment manage to breed themselves into anger and resentment the likes of which it would take days, months or years to cultivate for someone with a proper lifetime's worth of experience. i can find myself taken over by music to the degree that i am moved quite literally to tears while driving, a particularly soulful song grabbing hold of me and taking me with it, and for now, anyway, no matter how foreign the feeling i am willing to let myself go for the ride. it's a wonderful and magnificent and frightening and exhilarating thing to be one of those people whom i have always secretly respected.

i remember a scene frequently from the movie 'philadelphia'. i thought that film was overwrought and overrated, and i still feel that way, but that overwrought sense made this one scene work. i believe it's at a party, and tom hanks's character is singing with an opera and is so overcome that he is left a shuddering and balling mess by the time it has ended. it is over-the-top, almost silly in its overdone-ness. but that scene has stuck with me because i never thought myself capable and i would have loved to understand what that was like. i hated that scene when i saw it, thinking it foolish and ridiculous, but i have never forgotten the look on hanks's face, the camera sweep up and over him as the piece rules him. secretly, i wanted to be able to do that.

well, i can do that. i am actually built that way and have made myself not believe it, forced myself to control it, tame it and keep it under wraps. no more. i am my own son, and i have tidal waves of emotion that i have never let myself experience in which i am now going to be happy to swim. i will let myself daydream. i will stand and stare at a piece of art that moves me until i can no longer bear it. i will let myself be sad about something not going the way i had hoped or be overjoyed by something that did. i am standing still and watching those waters spill, and i intend to dance in them as they fall like a kid playing in the rain.

this is a test

mostly just to see if this thing still works! it's been forever since i wrote anything, and a lot of that is because i haven't had much in the way of inspiration of late. also, with time the desire to churn everything out through the keyboard fades. all the miserable thoughts i might have start to lose the need to be expressed the longer i am in therapy. it doesn't feel yet like i am past the point where depression is a risk anymore, and i certainly haven't made any breakthrough that has magically made me fart sunshine. but therapy is such a good thing - it's giving me a place where i can spit out all of my c0ncerns and worries and sadnesses with someone else, and that almost negates the original point of this blog.

and so i am considering what to do with it from here. i have enjoyed writing. a lot. thus, i think from this point forward i'll likely have sporadic mental health and emotional musings, but that this will either become a home for my general philosophical ramblings or nothing more than a relic that documents essentially the final quarter of 2008. only time will tell.