ten years

On April 20th, I hit a decade without drinking. I've said in the past, I feel great about managing this, but there will always be a part of me that simply considers this as getting back to square one. Even more so, considering the years of mental health issues that I had ignored as real and trying to get right on that path. I like to think that I'm managing that as well, but the landmarks involved are of course less tangible and progress isn't nearly as linear.

During new years, I try to make an inventory of things that occurred in the last year and try to isolate moments that I can identify and acknowledge where I could have done something different, or at least how I could improve how I handled it. This year, there were a few incidents that I was happy to be able to discuss with the people involved to a positive end. It's not so simple for things on a much longer trajectory though. It's difficult and sometimes impossible to discuss incidents from years ago and then try to raise the issue that others may have completely moved past, potentially opening old wounds, and all that. Something I had come up with at the beginning of therapy all those years ago was about “learning to be okay with not being okay.” I think that's still a life-long lesson to learn, and a way to deal with those old wounds that might not be right to open for others.

In the dark days, I would not be able to accept that, and push and push for resolution to problems, not acknowledging that that could only really do more damage to a delicate situation. Sitting with past failures is something that I've taken to heart, but not with crippling debilitation. Having hit that decade, I let my personal review extend further, covering more personal failings beyond only the year, and between psych and therapy, identified a few patterns that helped me to make sense of recurring issues and pain that I had dealt.

But first, since these thoughts were initially brought on by introspection and extending that scope further back, I'm going to dwell on a bit of literary influence that popped up.

It had to have been almost twenty years since I first read the Canterbury Tales, undoubtedly for some public-school assignment. With hindsight, I can detect some trends which directly highlight some of the thought patterns that have an impact, for both better and for worst. In the classic, numerous stories are told by characters on a pilgrimage. They each have their own morals or humor and a particular piece that always stuck with me involves the character "the Reeve," and a line in the prologue to his rather humorous (but crude) short story.

Taking away any surrounding context, this line affected me enough to write it in the margin of my ever-present notebook that survived through the years:

- Until we are rotten, we cannot be ripe. -

There is the Old English version ("til we be roten, kan we nat be rype") which was also striking, but that was unknown to me at the time. I also think I may have taken a different feeling from the quote had I considered that version.

Nonetheless, when I was younger, I read that as an invitation. That you could not achieve eventual wisdom until you let yourself be untethered and reckless (which it itself was profoundly reckless in hindsight) and may have subconsciously allowed myself too much slack. I don't think it was to blame, but could have definitely been a lie I told myself and considered as a bit of symbolism from the universe telling me that I was in the right line of thinking. An openness to synchronicity still affects me to this day.

But now, I read it as considering that only when you are experienced, can you see how you truly messed up or affected others, and yourself. Distance provides introspection, basically. Age allows for that consideration (if you're lucky and if you try).

Even further though, reading beyond that quote and the greater context of the prologue, it seems much more humorous and cynical than either of my takeaways. There's a level of "man is doomed to seek and continue to folly over the same things," even after achieving what he considers wisdom. It was astonishing to read analyses about this prologue, about how the Reeve was using humor to smooth over a personal insult, and then he himself resorted to insult and chiding. He was wise enough to embrace self-deprecation, but leans too far and touches upon self-pity. Personal grievance was a central plot point. So, while he does believe that wisdom only comes with age, he uses it as a defense of his bawdy storytelling and lingering lust and personal grievances. While his physical strength is gone, his will and desires are as strong as ever... which makes it "okay" that he's about to go all in on a revenge joke/story using sex and slapstick comedy.

Young me was an idiot (and current me probably is too, in different ways) and my examples of ignorant observations from that time are only an inkling of that fact, haha.

Nonetheless, I can at least now come away from that quote that has stuck with me without blaming it for any of the antisocial patterns I would eventually fall into. I can only imagine what I will take away from that prologue in another ten years' time.

Moving past that, it's interesting to think about the me that had ever considered that as a "license to be untethered" as a young adult, that I just had to follow impulses and desires only because I knew that I could eventually get back on the level. Why couldn't have I just gotten square from the jump? I instead told myself that I had time to get "better," and instead went down a track that would eventually lead to me pushing all sorts of light and good away. I'm happy to say that I've been constantly working at undoing a lot of that self-inflicted damage.

I can isolate on occasions over the years that I allowed personal affronts and relationship issues to kick me in the gut and then used that experience as scar tissue for the future, immediately resorting to the worst-case scenario to avoid that same kind of hurt later on. I didn't realize the damage that that was constantly, passively happening in the meanwhile. How absolutely bitter I could be. Which, though I know I'm far removed from that being the case, made recent conversations so much more powerful and endearing.

In relatively recent professional interviews, before I had fully moved onto managing a large team, my boss for over a decade keyed me in on a few things that he had "overheard" from upper management in the review process. I was told that they said things like, when referencing me and why they felt I was perfect for the role, "that he never loses his cool, nothing bothers him" -- why couldn't I have embraced that in every aspect of my life a long time ago?! Why did I compartmentalize that so terribly?! It was just very rewarding to know that that is how others felt around me in what could very easily be a stressful environment. Not bad for a "reformed nihilist," was my first thought. Never could have considered myself as a "people person," with how introverted and shy I feel that I am most of the time.

Looping back around to the long-term observations I was thinking on during this time, I came around to the topic of my weird feelings and experiences with hospitals. I did a terrible job of keeping things in perspective over the years and in a wide variety of relationships. I really wondered why the fuck I felt and acted that way even if things felt wrong so often in the last decade and even longer. At the end of the day, I think it mostly came down to early experiences, avoidant behaviors of my own doing, and just plain dishonest people in my past that I allowed to influence me too much when I later encountered similar scenarios involving unrelated people, people who didn't deserve the same treatment that the dishonest ones should have earned in a just world.

The earliest relevant memory I could think about was when I was maybe six years old. We suddenly had to bring a relative to the ER in the middle of the night. Hours went by, the emergency was abated, and we were all in good spirits. But it was about four am and there I was, falling asleep standing up. We were insistent on staying and I remember the conversation now that the relative was okay and recovering, the insistence that we go home and get sleep. But we drove them there. "It didn't matter!" Back and forth. Neither side would budge. We wouldn’t leave but also wouldn’t be comfortable in the room or waiting area. The compromise would be that we left the car there with the relative (because they would be good to go later on). I remember the stars that night as my dad and I walked home. It went from a possibly traumatic incident to an endearing one that I remember to this day. But I remembered coming away from it with the sense that going to the hospital was a personal ordeal to get in and get over with, with someone pleading for the others to leave the hospital when they weren't the ones sick or hurt. There was a sense of embarrassment that I derived from that experience. I think I would go on to internalize and project off of that feeling.

Later on, when I was still young but not young enough to really justify the naive feelings or damage I took away from it, one of my grandfathers passed away. I had long held conflicting feelings with this one grandfather. He was only ever sweet(ish) and supportive(ish) to me as his grandson, but he and his family were never very good to my mom. He was a tall man, a huge figure in family mythology, and I only ever regarded him as such, touched by this negative world of emotion surrounding my feelings towards how they had all treated my mom. After a long sickness, he eventually passed, and we went to visit my grandmother and the family at the childhood home. He had been in end-of-life hospice at home. Seeing him, terribly frail and dead, was a complete shock to me. He looked nothing like my grandpa. And then my grandmother says, "kiss him goodbye." I stood at the bedside, frozen, and then eventually did so. I stopped thinking about death for a long time around then. A few years later, I would often think about it myself in the depths of depressive episodes, but only selfishly as an escape. Never about this experience.

Throughout the years, working at a hospital, I saw many variations on these two personal experiences. Huge families gathering around an ailing family member, miserable old people who wanted to be left alone, and every configuration between the two poles. I never took away what the universal, proper reaction to being in the hospital was. I knew you should be there and be supportive, but internalizing never wanting to imagine myself in my grandpa's position (completely unrecognizable in a bed too-big) I simply never allowed myself to think about it. There was embarrassment and fear and a sense that it was a solitary experience to get in, get out of, and not burden others with. That was how I felt about it for myself and I let it smother over how I should have been there for loved ones. One time, I was even hospitalized myself. I woke one afternoon, still in and out of it, to see my best friend sleeping in the chair next to me. It meant the world to see him. But inside, deep inside, I was horrifically sad that I was making someone else sit there for what I felt was a situation entirely of my own doing.

Perhaps that moment could have struck me over the head and forced me to take a good hard look and get my shit together, but that was not the case. I would go on to interact with those other, external, aforementioned horribly dishonest people over the next decade of my life. Honestly, too many times to count, I was guilted and forced to attend to people from all sorts of personal relationships regarding crises of varying severity... that in the end were only ever bullshit. Fake suicide threats (that you must take seriously, you never know what someone is actually going through; I only learned it was an intentional, purposeful lie after the fact), threats of self-harm and or harming others, deaths of their relatives, literal murders of their relatives, of their relatives' suicides, of horrific diagnoses (that were later also discovered to be Grade-A bullshit), of literal deaths... all of which were lies. From multiple people from multiple different social circles. For a long time. All of these were on my shoulders for years and years and back then, I did act “properly.”

The remaining negative and wrong takeaway I had from those experiences was, at the time, only: “and all that… for what?”

This took all of my conflicted feelings about hospitals and firmly, squarely, bludgeoned them into the earth. I refused to allow any related thoughts affect me. And, in the process and over time, I hurt plenty of people that I cared about, by neglecting the seriousness of their concerns or plans regarding health. I regret every failure. I was disillusioned, but I allowed it to make me detrimental to loved ones. I was that detriment.

So those are the thoughts that most strongly came to me when I tried to do my decade inventory. Don't take this as a depressing narrative. It was very rewarding to connect some dots and see some patterns. And it only ever allows me to know what to look out for in the future and to not allow further hurt to seep into the world, by my own hand.

Here's to a decade. Here's to (hopefully) many more. Problems never stop existing, but at least in the future I know that they will confidently not be because of alcohol. We'll check back then. Maybe then we'll also check back in with our unsavory friend, the Reeve, too.