I See You

You can live a beautiful life and hate it. I remember cleaning up dog shit on a beautiful spring afternoon. The puggle was trying to prove a point and left me a present while I was taking a nap before rehearsal. I remember tabulating my life-wins while cleaning up the mess: nice car, hot wife, prestigious education, dream career, crippling anxiety, raging alcohol problem, childhood trau—oh shit that’s the wrong list.

All the external things I had chased eventually came—but the relief I believed they would bring never did. Relief specifically from this incongruence between what everyone sees and what it feels like to white-knuckle life under threat of unforgiving self-shame and paralyzing perfectionism.

I’d surfaced something in myself by checking those boxes, though, and that was a false sense of normalcy. I could feel normal because I had a wife and later a son, a career in an enviable field, and owned a home. I was doing all the big boy things you’re supposed to do when you complete formal education, but I did them like I do most things: quickly and with the expectation that I would feel complete once the checklist was complete.

The reality is more like that ache right after someone pops you in the nuts, except it stays there, nagging you in perpetuity.

It was impossible to get “comfortable,” and nothing dulls pain like a stiff drink or 17. For some people it’s a line of coke or a shopping spree, and others it’s a meth-fueled orgy after a night at the blackjack table. Pick your poison, but you’re going to reach for something when your mind can’t balance the checkbook on the reality of, “I followed all the steps, but it still hurts.”

Once you take the tonic, you get some relief. You’re not pushing and pulling at the same time anymore. It’s like Lupe Fiasco said,

“So we Kick, Push Kick, Push Kick, Push Kick, Push Coast

And the way he roll just a rebel to the world with no place to go”

And that feels great for a while until it starts to take its own toll—until it starts to become more of a liability than a reliable anesthetic. Until it starts to take away the joy along with the pain.

Now at that point the boxes are getting unchecked. That country song is playing and your wife, truck, dog, house, and baby are gone. It’s only logical for a reasonably intelligent person to conclude, something’s wrong with me.

Until someone asks, “what does believing you’re broken protect you from?”