I really don’t have anyone following me but on the chance that someone does read this or other recent posts, it would be easy to assume that my view of the world is pessimistic. This is not the case. Currently there are many issues that I am dealing with, and writing during this process will hopefully be cathartic. Professionals say there is a lot of unresolved grief and I’ve been working really hard on getting it to the surface and expressing it to hopefully move on to bigger and better things.

Twenty years ago I had a plan for my life. Unfortunately (or fortunately, maybe?) life had its own plan. My twenty year plan included success, money, marriage, more children, and exploring the world through travel and cultural experience.

Over the last two decades I achieved many of those objectives but the path has proven anything but linear and previous ideas of success and life exploration have followed a different paradigm. I enjoyed success in two different and substantial careers, real estate and money management, that allowed for a high degree of material possession and personal freedom. I fell in love and got married. I went to college as an older student and obtained a degree from a tier 1 business school.

I felt successful in the typical western sense. But none of this brought internal peace and contentment. Every individual goal that was achieved was never enough and the stakes kept getting greater and greater as I pursued the elusive carrot on the stick, always in sight but never quite able to get there. The reward sought was acceptance of who I was internally and what I perceived others wanted me to be.

From 2003 through 2007 I was sober. Sober as in not using mood-altering chemicals but not sober in the sense of recovery from the pattern of thinking which caused chemical seeking behavior. The booze and drugs had been replaced with success. I would get jazzed on reaching a goal but that hole in my soul still couldn’t be filled. My wife and material possessions conveyed a sense of accomplishment to the outside world. If other people thought I was doing well then that internal semi-conscious monologue of personal contempt and loathing was silenced, even if it still remained below the surface like the San Andreas fault, ready to devour the good life in California when the friction became too great.

The Great Recession was my earthquake. The large house was a symbol, and as the ability to sustain the cultivated lifestyle of success began to erode with our dwindling incomes, cracks in the marriage widened. She was beautiful, inside and out, and I never felt like I deserved her. With a half real, half made-up back injury in 2007, my chemical addiction was off and running again through prescribed opiates.

At first she wasn’t aware. It took nearly one and one-half years before she found a pill bottle and it was another one and one-half years later before she finally had enough. There were several ultimatums during that period and somehow it was believed that she wouldn’t really leave. When the last ultimatum was presented, either go to treatment or move out, I knew it was serious. But delusional thinking had me believe that those two choices were of equal weight in her eyes. She really wanted me to go to treatment and had I done so, maybe it would have shown that for once, her hopes, dreams, and wishes could be placed in the primary position of our life together. My need to support the facade created against the world had been the most important objective to that point and the decision to move out rather than acquiesce to her demand was just another attempt at wanting to maintain my “position”, regardless of the position I really held.

It turns out that everyone knew then what I was struggling against. When she said she wanted a divorce six weeks later, I ran to her father thinking that his religious conservatism would somehow prevent her from making a terrible mistake. Little did I know that he encouraged her to leave. Words he told me the day we met, the last conversation I’ve ever had with him, stung me to the core. I had already lost her respect and now I was losing her.

Things spiraled out of control after that. She was gone, the house was gone, eventually I lost my job and the money was gone. I spent several lost years pursuing relationships devoid of meaning and in jobs that corrupted my morals and sapped my motivation. It took a DUI a little more than a year ago to finally embrace the idea that everything needed to change, including what was happening internally. It isn’t to say that change was resisted. In fact, I had been dabbling around the shores of change without diving into the middle of it.

True change only seems possible by going well outside the comfort zone and protective shield of the external facade. In other words, only by a willingness to be vulnerable to others. For me that means acknowledging faults and failures and allowing others, as human beings, to make their own mistakes without judging them. It means letting my innate sensitivity out as a strength rather than perceive it as a weakness when expressing emotion to others. And it means grieving the loss in my life.

I loved my wife and I’m sad she’s gone. I love my mother but am sad she never took interest in me or my daughter. I’m sad for the multitude of lost opportunities of love, happiness, and fulfillment in this life.

Fear has been the single greatest motivator of action thus far. I am scared that the pattern of loss is now ingrained in my psyche to the extent that it is subconsciously recreated over and over again. Mortality is in sight and it seems time is running out. Can I salvage what’s left and change the pattern? Can the fear of lying on my deathbed in ten, twenty, or thirty years with massive regret supersede the fear of being hurt today or tomorrow?