Issues

I recently found that I have 2 primary issues that I have to get myself over in as expedient and orderly manner as possible. Since the two issues run counter to reason and logic and deal more with intuition and intangible needs, this should prove to be quite a grueling journey. There is no better time than now and no better place than the beginning, so let’s explore, shall we?

TRUST:

Trust: reliance; certainty based on past experience; allow without fear. Kind of a bleak picture painted so far based on the definition alone, isn’t it? To pick it apart, my certainty based on past experience is exactly that which I must overcome. Reliance on anyone other than myself seems to be quite impossible at this point, and to allow without fear is laughable, as my issue #2 will soon demonstrate. It is fairly well known that Nine Inch Nails is my favorite band, and that many of the lyrics within the music speak to me on a primal level. One of my favorite lyrics lately comes from the album Broken and goes “Put my faith in God, put my trust in you, now there’s nothing more fucked up I can do.”

I realize that I no longer trust. I don’t trust my bosses, I don’t trust my coworkers, I don’t trust God. I don’t trust people in general. I’m not entirely sure that I trust myself, though I like to think that I am the only one I do trust. When you have your foundation of faith shattered, when the bedrock you built upon turns to sandstone and crumbles, where do you begin to build anew? Do you trust marble to hold up the next age’s dreams and desires? Do you look for the perfect stone to withstand the time and trials that are sure to come? Or, do you accept the seeming fact that nothing lasts and just build upon the first convenient site that offers itself with no eye towards the future and no cares as to whether what you build will last? Neither option appeals to me at this point, as I don’t know that I am capable of building at the moment anyway, regardless of the foundation upon which I would begin.

For 10 years I shared everything with someone I considered to be my other half, my soul mate. She knew all my hopes and dreams, all my fears and failures, all my strengths, all my shortcomings. I knew hers as well, at least as well as she would allow me, which if you were to buy into the things she says now, wouldn’t be very well at all. So how does one go about recovering from such a devastating loss? I wonder if I would be well served to ask someone who has lost all their physical possessions to fire or flood. I wonder if the process for recovering the physical can be used on the emotional through some means of interpretation.

I realize that at some point I must learn to trust again, that I must take the chance, risk failure and disappointment if I am ever to be able to be happy again. I’ve never liked gambling. I don’t gamble in casinos, though I enjoy watching other people do so. I guess what it boils down to is my aversion to losing. I hate to lose. I prefer to find a sure thing and expend my energy on that. I’ve just learned that there is no “sure thing.” So I will eventually be forced to gamble. I’ve done so before, so I know it is possible, and for years I considered myself to be winning, or to at least not come out at a loss. Thinking my way through this mess, I see that Occam’s Razor is just about the only way to hope to resolve the issue. I will eventually have to boil the past down to sludge, take this sludge and use it to fill the cracks and holes in my ego, and start as if there were never a past to judge from. I will somehow have to learn from what mistakes have been made, but refrain from comparing future and past experiences.

Why is it that knowledge of what one must do cannot assist in the execution of needed tasks?


FEAR

Fear: be afraid or feel anxious or apprehensive about a possible or probable situation or event. Ah, so here is why the first issue is so compounded and convoluted! If fear is my secondary issue (and honestly, it might actually be the primary one, who am I to judge?), it makes TRUST all the more difficult to attain as well. Yes, I am afraid. I am afraid to allow someone else to know me, to open myself again to the kind of pain and bitterness that I have recently experienced. I am afraid to allow myself to have feelings and emotions that attach themselves to something or someone other than myself. Fear is not something that is easily dispatched or discounted. In very rare instances, reason might help one overcome fear at least in a limited capacity or for a limited time. On the whole, fear is irrational, sub-conscious, even if the resulting side effects can be felt with the conscious.

I had hoped to be able to think my way through this one as I typed, but nothing is coming to me. I don’t know how to deal with the fear, how to master it. I refuse to ignore it, that goes counter to my intuition that it must be faced and conquered, not denied and ignored. I could list my fears, but even in a mood of sharing, I feel that this list is far too personal.

An interesting thought… does my submission to my fears imply that I trust fear over myself? Is a trust in fear a beginning to trust elsewhere, or is it an oxymoron? When dealing with fear in the past, I generally concentrated on the goal and applied all my efforts to attaining what I was after instead of allowing the fear to paralyze me. Perhaps what I need is a goal to concentrate on, something to drive towards in spite of the fear and mistrust. What a crux! In order to have a worthy goal, I must trust that the end result is attainable. Since I have an issue with trust, my fear overrides my belief that such a goal exists in the first place. Without such a goal, I have no chance to overcome my fears. If I don’t overcome my fears, I cannot learn to trust again.

Lets try this again without the drama, if I am capable. My fear is not confined to myself. I fear that I can and will likely break anyone who tries to assist me to the same degree that I am currently broken. If I don’t allow myself to rediscover trust, this fear will defeat me before I can begin.

As much as it galls me, I am going to have to concede defeat for now. I have no choice but to admit that my outlook on life this month is greatly improved from 3 months ago, and perhaps 3 months from now it will have improved enough more for me to deal with these issues effectively. Until such time, I find some scant comfort in the fact that I can at least identify my issues. I hope that by identifying them, the possibility exists that I will recognize when they come into play in my life and avoid playing into their hands blindly. This is my life, this is my future, this is my potential happiness at stake here. I wont be a slave to anyone, not even to myself. I will not allow myself to be chained and constrained based on my past for any longer than I must. I will heal, damn it, and I will do so post haste.