ouch.

i'm up early, which is only difficult in that i also slept poorly, and even that only after being awake longer than i should have been. yesterday was my first major insight and admission into something that i had feared was the case but was even more afraid to face.

it started in my therapy appointment yesterday, popped up in an email conversation with a friend, and then brandie asked me point-blank about it last night and it sent me on a long and difficult soul-searching mental road that has culminated in a very real and very painful realization. in the end, it was brandie's question that put me to the task of making myself look at it dead-square. we were up before bed, talking about my appointment today and what realizations may have come from it, and during the course of that conversation i mentioned that one of my major symptoms is that if you put me to it and made me write down a logical list of my blessings versus my curses, my list of blessings would be improbably long and my list of curses somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. i can see on paper that i am lucky and that my whole world is something for which i should be grateful. i have more than i deserve. but i don't feel lucky, i don't feel grateful. i can see that i am, my mind knows that i should be, but i simply do not feel it. and then she asked it.

'so, when you say that you love me, or when you tell the kids you love them, is an intellectual thing?'

the question went on from there to clarify that there was no judgment in it, to clarify that she would not be hurt by the response, to clarify that by it she was just trying to see if when i say 'i love you' i mean a warm and fuzzy in my heart feeling or something else. but what it meant to me is the difference between 'i love you' and 'i feel responsible to you and recognize that you bring advantages to my life'. ball-peen hammer to the forehead time. because i knew she had caught me. i had been found out for sure. my greatest secret was revealed, and i had been the one who accidentally pulled back the curtain. i was awake trying my damnedest to drag something up to defend myself to myself, to find a shred of something i could honestly say made me human and not a failed husband and father, but i never did find it. and then i faced my own demon: i do not seem to have much in the way of emotions that don't qualify as negative.

i had worried on this for a long time, deep-down knowing that i would eventually come to this conclusion. and i don't mean to suggest that i am truly some sort of sociopath who feels nothing at all. i think that i feel a lot, but that those feelings are all the ones that people fear with good reason. each of us has a well of feelings to which we go, where we can dip in the bucket and drag up a fill of love, gratitude, compassion, sadness, fear, loneliness, or whatever we should feel at the time. mine is a dark well, and i don't like to go to it. the emotions with which i have experience in my own soul are not my favorite ones, to say the least, and it seems that over time i have found a way to stop going to the well altogether. sounds like a fine defense mechanism until one recognizes that rather sizable hole in the theory - it not only keeps me from responding emotionally in bad ways, but in good ones, too.

for as long as i can be sure of my memories i have felt guilty about this one thing that i have carried with me. it has been forever since i have felt like i love anyone. i know that i should, i know that i do, but i don't feel it. i can say that i love brandie, i can say that i love my children, but i have never really had a moment where when i said it i was bathed in some soft and pale yellow light, where when those words cam from my mouth my heart was full to overflowing with beauty and wonder. i have never felt like a father should feel. i have never felt like a husband should feel. i put a cap on my well some time in the past because the only things in there were things of which to be afraid, and so my loves are all intellectual ones. i am a father. i am a husband. i am a friend. and i know this about myself, and so i behave accordingly. i show love, i show friendship. i act like someone in those relationships should. but i don't feel those things. they don't feel genuine, they don't feel like mine, they don't feel like me.

and so comes back the curtain as far as i can pull it. i don't yet know why this is, but for whatever reason, be it that i don't feel i deserve it or that i'm waiting to be found out as something i am not or whatever, i feel like an impostor, like i am living someone else's life, a life that was designed for someone who is not me but into which i fell almost by accident, and now i play the role i chose. husband. father. friend. roles, all of them. and none feels like it's genuine, or at least not i believe it is supposed to feel.

do i love my family? of course i do. who could not love them? but i don't love them like you do. i don't love them with my heart, i love them with my head. my heart is just not involved. is it something i can learn? i hope so. but even as intimate as i am with my sadness and misery i have a devil of a time with crying; i don't cry much, and when i do it is short-lived, and this is from someone who suffers with a major depressive disorder. if i'm so detached from my dominant emotion that i can't even cry, what capacity do i have for the emotions with which i am completely unfamiliar? and doesn't my family deserve more than i am giving them? don't my children deserve a father who genuinely loves them with all his heart? doesn't my wife deserve more than what i give her, a seemingly empty bag of words and occasional actions that look like love but are a hollow actor's portrayal of what he rationalizes as the correct behavior?

i feel like a failure in this regard. i feel like i am in a place i don't belong, living a life for which i was not designed. i am not comfortable with my role. i don't do happy, i don't do love. a father needs to be capable of both of those, and right now i am not. and so...ouch.

please forgive the mess that is today's entry. it's not to my usual standards of imagery or smoothness of language. but i hadn't the willingness to revise, rewrite or otherwise. i just barfed it up because it makes me feel a little sick.