The Wilderness of My Composure

Some of us are trying to figure ourselves out. And some of us do not care to think much at all, rather just make it through the day as it comes. I am the former, the thinker, and although I cannot entirely understand, I do have some friends who confidently admit they are the latter.

For decades I have considered myself an adolescent, really. Specifically it feels like I am still 17 years old, emotionally. Regardless of the accomplishments, accolades, promotions or otherwise, I’ve always felt like a young person. Even when I am leading the room filled with hundreds of professionals, and even when I am wearing a tie, I have never seen myself as an adult. Not even as my two children now advance into adulthood themselves. Also amongst the inventory of my possessions, still I have not arrived. This sensation has always lingered over me like an unannounced supernatural spirit. Weird isn’t it? Well, it has always felt strange to me. Never had I ever tried to sort this situation out.

For most of 2024 I stretched back and forth between the hardness and softness of life, trying to find my center. You may have watched this play out. At times it was like I was lost in a maze of mirrors, trapped in heavy fog, and standing bound in total darkness, all at once. By way of social media I received handfuls of opinions that I should not feel this way. Rather as suggested, I should feel differently than I factually did. Then into the Fall of 2024, I began to filter. I pulled back from sharing my reality because I was rather certain the responsive remarks would make me feel that there was more wrong with me than there was, like I was a broken and inappropriate person. Simultaneously I was being harder on myself than even the whole world could have been. Often I took the smallest feedback and used it to back-up my believed human deficiencies. For many years I have operated as such, finding reinforcement for my self-defeating thoughts. Yet it has always been me alone putting myself down. Meaning: Although I hear these comments, I quickly take them and run with them all on my own. Perhaps this finds me playing ‘the victim’, as one person put it. Truth be clear though, my own journey has led me here under my own accord and I have never tried to claim otherwise. Still, a full decade has now passed with me suffering more and more, me dragging myself down and down, and down. During this time I absorbed many experiences good and bad yet much of the filter I applied to my own feeling, thinking, and believing has been negative.

Recapping the last ten years in plain terms I openly admit the following: I have been in conflict with my self. I have been isolated. I have been scared, frustrated, angry, and confused. Along the way I adopted a desperate striving to escape. The same thoughts repeated, my behavior reoccurred, and the outcomes recycled.

Slightly prior to a decade ago and somewhat kicking things off, around the time of 2013, my mood was so far out of control that I spent a few hours in the emergency room, flooded with discomposure. I had been on and off anti-depressants for five years by that time, and my inside-out emotions seemed to be intensifying. Then in 2017, I was going down the path to end my own life. Shortly thereafter my second wife moved out, although that sad day was completely of my own doing, not hers. And then fast forward to about two weeks ago, right before Christmas, I reached my emotional rock bottom. Things got so bad that there was nowhere else to turn except inwards. I began writing.

Although I am able to travel into the very depths of myself, at times I do not dive as far as I need to in order to figure stuff out. Last week I stopped to go deep, deeper, deepest, and there I began to understand. But I had to suffer entirely, it was the only way, I had to thoroughly attach myself to the negative in order to even attempt to see it, more or less release it. To say that the expedition was long and hard cannot be overstated.

One of my journal entries from this dig-deep time is as follows.

Can I drop this unhappiness?

Well, it’s not really unhappiness.

So is it pain, is it fear?

It’s the confusion, it’s the uncertainty.

It’s cynicism.

It’s disbelief.

It’s loneliness.

Yes it’s fear.

Yes it’s pain, but it’s legacy pain.

It’s not current pain.

For sure it’s history, it’s memories.

It’s a void.

It’s emptiness.

It’s silence.

It’s isolation.

It’s aloneness.

It’s an unloving, but it is not hate.

It’s not cold, or warm.

It’s not a sharp wind, or cloudiness.

It’s a separateness, an unknowing, an ignorance; it’s a question.

It’s me not knowing myself, it’s me realizing I know nothing.  

The intricacy of my clarity began to untangle unlike has ever happened before. My perplexedness started to settle. Oddly, I then felt taller. Not spiritually heightened or more full of wisdom, but physically Jack-And-The-Beanstalk taller. Within one day’s time I grew up.

What happened? I do not know except to say it occurred fathoms deep. I might describe it as a switch was flipped, I held new eyes, a light came on. Was it religious-like no, but yes super-special all the same. Do I proclaim to have arrived or awoken no, but maybe I’m on my way. Regardless, no longer does a teenager inside operate me. Maybe now eclipsing emotional childhood there is certainly a brightness I can adopt, a wiser sort of beginner’s mind I can occupy as I start anew.

Often my intentions are not becoming of the outcome, and I am sure this will not change. I will start, I will stop, and I will frustrate. Awhile, visibly and subliminally, the world asks something of me. This request is something silent, but obvious.

It is a literal new day, I feel like a new me, and it is certainly a new year. I have tried to explain this experience to several people lately and the best analogy I can find is this: I used to see through my well-used lens. But recently I got rid of that lens, I either sold it, or donated it, or put it in the trash, not sure except to say my old lens is gone, it has expired. Now I have a new lens.

Although not nearly final or stabilized, here now my outlook.

I will continue as a helper of humans.

I will share, unfiltered, using my authentic voice.

I will challenge.

I will go deep.

I will be curious, and then I will be curiouser.

I will not strive for change far off and away from where I am not.

I will stay here so to understand.

Once understanding, awareness happens.

Once aware, change occurs.