it still feels true

it's been a challenging week. a milestone birthday was reached and with it i have found myself in a state of perpetual reflection. today i heard a song that made me think of my parents and particularly my father. i've posted it below and if you've been a reader of this blog for awhile you will understand the association.

i think this desire for a home, a place i belong, and the pain that comes from the feeling that i have never had this and the increasing doubt i ever will likely finds their origins with my family experience. i shared this fact with a friend recently and there was agreement with my supposition.

even as old as i've gotten and as many times as i've thought about this subject, i am often surprised by how very deep the pain goes. i've written about it i'm pretty sure several times in this blog. yet, each time i get in touch with that particular life experience it is as if the loss and sense of abandonment happened yesterday. it's as if i'm still that child who believes that the end of my parent's marriage had something to do with me and that the fact that my father never appeared in my life was somehow a sign of my not being good enough.

it is true that these are unfair perspectives for a child to have and certainly for an adult to still harbor to a certain degree in his soul. i tell myself how often that they are not true, but as i said to dr. s at the end of a session some months ago, "it may not be true, but it still feels true." and i don't know how to make it otherwise.

real thing - kenny loggins

and now what?

so the big day is here. the day that commemorates my reaching the half century mark in life. and it has arrived with several birthday greetings and well wishes. it also has arrived with the perverse tradition of providing a cake with a tombstone and a grim reaper displayed as well as all kinds of paraphernalia declaring the advanced and apparently decrepit state i've reached (i didn't realize that birthday knick knacks had grown into its own cottage industry or that they could be so obnoxious).

so how do i feel about all of this? well, it has certainly been nice to be remembered by family, friends, and work colleagues. i seem to be managing ok emotionally, mostly pushing to the side the sadness i've been experiencing of late. but it's "mostly" and not "entirely" because underneath the experience of confetti and messages and cake is the reality that at the close of what will be a shortened workday (hey, it's my birthday. i'm entitled) will be the return to the same empty house and the same feeling of an empty life.

i spent much of last night online chatting with a friend about my emotional state. through the course of the conversation, he and i both observed that while i was acutely aware of both what was wrong and what the likely causes were of my struggles with depression, i had no clue of what to do about it. my months of therapy with dr. s can certainly be credited for reaching the conclusions that i have. at the same time, the reason i took a break from that process was that i couldn't seem to break through to the healing i need. after over a year, i'm pretty much still in the same space emotionally. yes, i have more insight and that basically makes the situation something like, "yes, you feel sad and lost but at least you know why you feel this way."

maybe the biggest problem is that i no longer know what i want from life. i don't know what it is that will make my life feel more fulfilled. actually, that is not true. it's not really that i don't know. it's that i continue to question how and if the elements of feeling i have a place in the world and experiencing meaningful regular companionship with physical and emotional intimacy will ever manifest in my life in any substantive way. after 50 years, how long do you keep asking when will things get better?

at the threshold of a milestone

so today marks the official last day of my fourth decade on this earth. the recognition of this impending date (and more so the day tomorrow) made for a pretty challenging weekend emotionally. and has been the case with each turn of the decade since i moved out of my twenties, the challenge has little to do with getting older, but is more about how i have felt about my life at each transition. at every change, my life seemed to resemble little of what i had hoped it would be at that point. and certainly at each point, i had the same sense of not belonging, not having a home in this world.

the one difference, i see between this time and the previous times is that in the past when i've felt like this there was still a certain amount of belief that i had time for my life to become better as long as god was gracious and would grant me a resonably long life. in this season, however, that belief is in far shorter supply. while i may not yet be "old," i am certainly not young and likely the number of days (particularly productive ones) i have left in my life are fewer than the ones that are now in my past.  and while i am grateful to be alive, i am deeply saddened by the life i am "living."

so many people (many who are younger) keep admonishing me to make my life better. the thing that they don't quite understand is that i have a significant history of trying to make my life better, and in some spaces (for example, economically) my life has gotten better. better, however, does not in this case equate to satisfying or fulfilling. in fact, there is always the question of in attempting to make my life better, have i in some ways damaged the overall quality of it perhaps irreparably? the immediate example that comes to mind is all of the moving around that i have done in pursuit of better career opportunities only to at the end of all of that be alone. then again, i think that if i had not done this latest round of moves, i could still be alone and also in a bad job.

i guess the "net net" of all that i am stating is that in fifty years of life, there are a lot of attempts, a lot of decisions, a lot of choices, a lot of roads taken, and when it feels that you keep ending up back in the same spot in these dark, cold woods of life, alone and lost, you question if the time has come to stop forging ahead and to just sit and wait for someone to come find you and lead you home. the problem for me is i've lost confidence that anyone is looking, that anyone even knows or cares that i am here.