part 43

I had been experiencing a lot of inner peace and spiritual growth and stuff like that in the months before my dad died. I was finally able to fully accept certain things about him, and certain things about me, and to really just let it all go.

I don’t mean let it all go, as in forget it or whatever. Maybe a better way to phrase it would be that I stopped holding on to all of it so tightly. I had been working toward the point where I could know in my heart and soul – a/k/a “accept” – what I knew in my mind to be real, and I had begun to feel that distinctly in the months before my dad died.

The timeline of events is really quite extraordinary, and I am talking about several pretty big events at one time. Let me go back and explain what I mean:

In the past few months, I had finally gotten to a point where I felt I accepted myself wholly. I knew in my mind that I was not my dad, but there was so much shit to sift through from his years and years of brainwashing me to believe that I was a definitive extension of him. I wrote of the effects of this brainwashing a lot throughout my posts in this blog – it has been very, very, very difficult to overcome.

I have been terribly disappointed to find that being able to analyze and intellectualize and explain who I am in certain ways, and why I have done certain things, has not been the key to changing or getting past difficulties or to recover from pain. I suppose it has always been my main obsession to know “why” – I view this question, and even this word, as madness incarnate.

It is a ridiculous thing to ask over and over, especially when it has kept me from accepting the obvious and living my life. I read a story in a book that is pretty well-known in the recovery world, about this person who described the question of WHY beautifully.  

He (or she, I don’t remember) imagined himself on a bridge above a body of water. This is not a story about suicide, so I like to think that the bridge was very small and close to the body of water, and that the body of water was a trickling stream or tepid pond or something like that.

The author describes himself as standing there on the bridge looking down at the water, and the entire time his pants are on fire. The fire is burning him, he knows it could kill him, he is afraid of it, it hurts a lot, but it does not even occur to him to just get in the water. He cannot comprehend this logic because he is so consumed with WHY his pants are on fire.

It’s as though he MUST answer the question of WHY his pants are on fire BEFORE he can realize that he can just step into the water.

In my mind, I also think that he probably eventually figured out he could just get in the water, and that the fire would go out, but he still was so consumed with WHY that he didn’t do it, or maybe even couldn’t do it. Perhaps there were people who loved him standing all around him yelling at him to get into the damn water before he was burned to death, but still that question – the insane notion of WHY – prevented him from saving himself.

In the book, the author goes on to describe this as analogous to his refusal or inability to begin the road to recovery from addiction. I could really relate to that, but that story stayed with me and I began to see how it applied to so many other things in my life.

One of the biggest ways it has changed my thinking is because of how ridiculous it is that the guy couldn’t or wouldn’t get into the water because he had to know WHY his pants were on fire first. It would have been just as easy (actually, much easier) for him to jump in the water and put the fire out, and then reflect on why his pants had been on fire.

Considering the insidious WHY in this context really allowed me to open my mind in so many ways. One of the ways was to realize that the answers to all of my questions might not be as important as I think they are. Eventually, I even began to realize that the answers to all of my questions – and even the questions themselves - might not be relevant at all in how I live my life.

In other words, I don’t have to know everything in order to put one foot in front of the other. All I need to know is that every time in my life I have put one foot in front of the other, it has landed on solid ground. The ground might not be so solid at the surface – maybe it seems like quicksand or something, or like it is not there at all – but never EVER have I put one foot in front of the other and not been eventually assured that I was actually stepping onto some sort of hard surface that would without question support me at that very moment.

I learned at a very young age that life is scary, and that trusting people can result in pain and death. But I have finally begun to realize – and ACCEPT – that I wasn’t put on this earth to be scared all the time.

And so even though I was still terrified of my dad, I made the decision to take a step toward my own family, the family I had never really known. My dad’s family.

And that was the next big event in the chain I was referring to at the beginning of this post.

The next big event was described in my post a few days before my dad died. “Part 38,” about how I had come to accept that he has much more to fear from me than I do from him, and that I have come to be able to see him for who he is, without all of that shit he wove around my eyes to make him look like anything else.

Then the last big event in this chain was that my dad died.

All of these events occurred within about three months, and in an order so perfect that there is no way to explain it away as mere coincidence. And I don’t believe it is mere coincidence – I believe it is much bigger than that, and much bigger than me, and I don’t really know what it is, and that’s okay.