Waiting for the Fog

Crossing the ridge on Kepler, if one is smart, one considers the potential for crosswinds and fog and summer snow and Avalanches any time of year. No matter the actual conditions when you set out, the island factor must be considered and you must always be prepared for things turning on a dime. If you can't see the way ahead, you might spend useless hours going the wrong way and you must carry basic tools to deal. A few die every few years on the trail, losing their way in the wrong conditions or not taking seriously the potential for things not going as intended.

Sometimes I think I chose this particular track because it must have somehow felt familiar due to the unpredictability factor. Maybe I chose the whole damn country because of that, as well. My making my way was symbolic. A pack strapped to my back, it was more than a tramp, it was a statement to myself, to the world that I can do this thing called living on my own, independent of my ex.

The truth is, I'm not so sure I can.

Most of the trail I spent thinking just how ridiculous my own anxieties actually are--at least while hiking. My world, my future all felt so crisp and clear and at hand. My intuition, my true self felt so close, it was as if the real authentic me who has felt a long way off was back--central, rooted, strong like the trees on the trail growing straight out of the rock.

Even crossing the spine, the fog rolled in and out like anxiety sometimes can. When it was close at hand, the visibility was sometimes 6 feet. But, even still the sense of things lurking behind the fog did not disturb me. When it cleared you could see for miles. While trekking, I enjoyed the clouds dancing with the mountains like some ballroom choreography set to the rhythm of the winds. So relaxed, as if dancing with my lover on the ballroom floor.

But once back, my anxieties and worries seemingly grabbed on, clinging with a fierce death grip like the moss and trees that clung to those rocks on the sides of the mountains of Fiordlands--waiting to topple and strip a clearing in one giant tree-slip avalanche.

I'm not sure why I chose to hike Kepler in Fiordland. And maybe I didn't choose it. Maybe the track chose me. It was fitting on most levels. The concerns of such variable weather conditions taking me off the trail hit close to home. Much like the narcissistic storms that come out of seemingly nowhere, blind siding my purpose or day or stability and necessitating tools to find my own way, yet again. I perpetually worry that I've lost my way in life--that I'm not getting out the right way, that I'll never find my own somebody to connect with again, that I'll continue at failing on every front in life over and over again. I feel like I've been tramping alone for so long, with a pack so heavy that I'm not sure I can relate anymore to most people. I'm tired of explaining to people who don't listen, who think they get it, who compare their drifting divorce experience to the one where you leave a narcissist who won't let you leave, ever.

Even four years out from "waking up," with his soon to be new wife settled in to the new house they bought together with the pool and the potted planters, you might still get blindsided by deep indescribable sadness as it once again strikes you that he never did love you and the years were just an illusion. The torture of potential memories that you haven't yet grieved for what they really were blowing in like a snow storm on Kepler in the middle of summer can keep you edgy. You do traverse a ridge.

You might never doubt the decision you made to leave the narcissist, but the overwhelming endlessness of the trek floats in like the clouds at times. I still worry I'll never fully escape his orbit. I worry he'll never get bored and leave me alone. I worry he'll never tire of trying to take or find something else to take from me. I worry that this track has no end or that it loops on forever like Kepler.

But looping though it is, Kepler does have a bridge at the end or beginning, however you manage it. And the name of the bridge is called Rainbow Reach. And I'm sure we can all imagine the symbolism of a Rainbow.

I know there were lessons in tramping this track. I'm still sorting out what those lessons might be. Part of that sorting out unfortunately appears to involve still more waiting--waiting for the fog or winds or weather to change.

Realness that You Don't Recognize

Sometimes the realness surprises you at the most inopportune, uncomfortable times when you'd rather not look your own shit in the face..

The times when you're ready to parade the story out and believe your own bullshit about how things really are.

I've dealt with this shit. I'm over it. I totally know what I'm doing....

And then that real friend shows up and is right there in the middle of the storm. Perhaps being scooped into the ice cream cone, himself. Taking the brunt of the ice cream shit show. Feeling the all powerful anger and whatnot and don't fuck with me edge....

And he just shows up. Takes the words and responds to them even if they don't fully make sense. As if to say it's ok....

Often, he doesn't actually use any words. Just shows up with the joke and the half hearted smirk that makes you catch a glimpse of your own bullshit.

Totally over my ex, you say. 

You don't even really get how much he actually sees through the bullshit smokescreen that you happen to believe about the story you tell yourself everyday until he is there dealing with the windmills and cardboard head gear like Sancho Panzes.

Notes to Self

When someone tells you who they are, believe them, the first time.

Remember that most of the time a person will tell you what you need to know about them without words. You will be tempted to pick the words they say that you find lovely and beautiful, that quite possibly contradict what they have already told you without words. Instead focus on what their actions say and run like hell if you find yourself wanting to focus on those flowering, smoke-screen type words that you especially like. These words aren't real. You are the one who added to their un-realness and you might be creating what you want to see in the world rather than what is.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them, the first time.

Remember that most of the time you will want to project good things onto a person, that aren't there. Wait. Give time. Give space. Shut the fuck up yourself and listen with your whole damn body to the space between the words. The attitudes, the quick judgments, the lack of compassion. If you cringe and want to apologize on the person's behalf to the exhausted waitress or the gay bartender, listen to your own damn body. Get the hell out of there.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them, the first time.

Remember that most of the time they will tell you things about how they see the world in the jokes, in the making fun, in the guessing at what you or others are experiencing. A wise person knows they don't know. The unwise will believe in their own ability to know, swiftly and quickly even in the huge wake of poor listening skills. Pay close attention to the things they "jokingly" accuse you or others of. It is often indicative of how they see the world and communicates much about their unhealed shit. They can't pretend in these instances, and the anger or irritability that is sugar coated in the name of humor will tell you a lot. If you say something and they "can't hear what you say" because "you can't take a joke," it is likely to be their best hearing and their hearing is not likely to get much better even with time. Walk away.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them, the first time.

A Poem from Fiordland

My eyes are filled with tears
at the sight of the mountains of Takitimu
and the mountains of Manwapouri.
Would that I were a bird,
that I might fly forth;
would that I might obtain
for myself wings.

Wild Water

What the Ranger didn't say was perhaps more important than what he did say.

It's safe. Nobody has ever had any trouble in drinking it. It's clean. Pure. Glacial. Stone washed.

He didn't say that there was risk, all the same. No diarrhea inciting Girardia, but risk on some other level altogether.

He didn't say that you can't drink this water on this walk and remain unchanged. He didn't say that you will never see the world the same again. He didn't say that this water might seep down into your soul. He didn't warn that this--this water is different precisely because it is wild water.

And the stuff wild water is made out of, no-one can be sure. 

This water runs free spirited. And if you bathe naked in it your free spirit might meet the free spirit of this wild water.

This wild water nobody controls. Nobody has poisoned it with chlorine or statins. Nobody has blasphemed it into a box the way the Christians sometimes do.

This wild water is different. In what ways, nobody can really say.

All that can be said is that dipping your cup in this stream and drinking will be more than wetting your palate. You drink this water and you might baptize your soul, in the goodness of the ages mysteriously held here in this water after much of nature's embrace has dried up from other places. Nobody can explain this. But, it might be, that you came all this way across the ocean just to drink this water from this stream, in this tiny moment on this walk. That might be it. And the sense of the Divine kindness in that just might overwhelm you. And don't you ever count on being the same after that.  

Leaning into the Lies

Somehow with the divorce final, I thought the need to lie and exaggerate things would slow down in my ex. Who the fuck cares anymore? We're done. I'd like for the record to reflect that. We don't need to interact except as regards my kids. But alas, my ex, filling the shoes of his father appears to have embraced the path of becoming more pathological in the lying. For no reason whatsoever?

Good news is I've made progress in the healing. I'm getting better at seeing perspective in his antics.

Case in point, yesterday. Had to have a conversation about the upcoming schedule. In the planning, we reviewed my upcoming plans next month.

That's the first I've heard of that... he said when I reviewed the March plans. He pretended that I was springing this upon him. It was so preposterous, I watched myself hardly allow his antics to register. I may have actually been bored. I felt so much indifference, it was as if he was far off and I could hardly hear him.

No. This is not the first you've heard. I said. I can forward you the texts, the emails, the transcripts of the phone conversations, if you like. Yawn. But, I know that I don't need to. Not for me. Go ahead and lay down in your own lie. Allow yourself to be enshrouded in it.

I felt calm. Nonplussed. Unrattled. I had the sense some two year old child had approached me with a plastic sword. Run along child, go play.

This is the first I've heard of that.

No, the stack of emails, texts, and conversations say otherwise.

There was another document from the lawyer. CC'd his name and mine at the bottom--mailed nearly a week ago--a document that stated that for some reason funds were "insufficient" in a financial account only he has access to.

He feigned ignorance. Even going so far as to take a picture on his phone of the document, cause yeah it's not your lawyer who sent it, not your name CC'd at the bottom on record, not you who moved funds out of the account. Right. Of course.

But, he needs to lie. He feeds on this stuff. And somewhere it has drifted past the point of even having threads of connection to reality, past the point of no return. The lies grow more intense, more bombastic, more ridiculous, so that he can have more food to suck down in order to stabilize his own blood sugar that depends upon the lie. I suspect he's unravelling, falling apart at the seams, self destructing. He's so focused on lie creation, nothing else holds relevance.  He's like the insect that keeps flying into the bug zapper, lying to itself about the shiny pretty light. The light can't kill me. The light can't kill me. The light can't kill me.

Of course, it can't kill you, Mr Amazing Logician. You say you are impervious to that! There is no arguing with your logic.

Keep saying that. At some point, it won't matter that you feel compelled to tell the world that your little bug self is impervious to the light. Eventually, you'll get settled into that truth. You'll get to bask in the light of a truth all your own. No one ever need contradict you. The truth is patient. The truth will wait to assert itself. But eventually, your little bug carcass will be found lying in its own truth on the ground. 

On Being a Bore

I suppose my latest strategy is to bore him to death. And this--this is much harder than it sounds.

You see. I don't actually think I'm a boring person.

I've numerous interests. Truth be told, I aspire to be a freakin renaissance woman, most of the time.

I'm the one in the apartment complex in need of a piano. I lift weights. I run the partial racks on the billiard table. I have a brain and a terminal degree. I enjoy art--even the art I make. I write. Most of the time, I prefer to do things myself, because I care about actually doing it to my own personal standard that sometimes seems different than others. As I type, I suspect I sound like a narcissist, myself.

I was raised by at least one parent with very high standards. Standards that might be construed as related to said parent's narcissistic traits.

That may have potentially contributed to my ending up with a narcissist.

Thus, I'm trying the boring strategy.

More or less I aim to communicate that I might be the most boring person on the planet.

I'm absolutely a bore. And this is hard. 

Because, if anything, the narcissist has caused me to work on myself, quite a bit, over the years. At many points, I had to work on myself in order to survive. I worked in order to learn and grow and change. Ironically, this was what the narcissist ended up conjuring out of me, though he can do precious little in conjuring such out of himself.

And so, in some sort of weird, ironic twist of fate, I kind of have him to thank for being who I am.

But, I'm so working on being a bore or at least communicating that I'm a bore. Just so you know...

on Clutches and Transitions

The clutch "went out" on my Honda. Maybe, you can blame it on the 200 thousand miles it has weathered and disclaim that it is rather old. You might even suggest we ought expect such behavior from a 1999 Honda Accord. We might even plan for it if we were the planning type.

But the what it "going out" means was that I was driving north on the 17 at 5am on a Saturday morning in the dark and cold when the revving in 5th gear wasn't right and I lost power and the missing sound was obnoxious enough that even I, non car-whisperer that I am, could recognize pathology in the sound and behavior. I prayed for non-texting teenagers as I hung out in the desert shoulder.

The tow truck showed. Only 4 dollars per mile plus the $80 per hour. Geez, what a deal!

Anyhow, the clutch.

The clutch's going out, miss firing or whatever clutches do when they fail struck me as strangely appropriate on some sort of grand symbolic level. You see it is the thing that facilitates the changing of gears, the switching of speeds or the redirecting. It is the one transitioning element.

And the clutch going out, might as well speak for my whole damn life at this point.

Because, I struggle with the transitions. Indeed, I feel like my own gears are perpetually missing as I go back and forth between my two opposing worlds--mountains and sun, entrepreneurial work and motherhood, future and past. There never seems quite enough time to feel settled in one locale before I'm on a plane back to the other.

I've never felt more alone.

I've never felt quite so detached--as if caught between worlds--as soon as I begin to more deeply connect, it is as if I'm sucked back up to that other place.

The garage said the flywheel had to be replaced. Apparently, sometimes you can file it down rather than replace it. But this can only happen if it hasn't taken on too much damage. So not this time--too much damage.

Right now, I feel like that flywheel--worn down to the nub. I feel the endlessness of the journey, like my Honda on the side of the 17, I am broken down, exhausted, unable to seamlessly shift between the different worlds I must inhabit in order to survive. I tell myself that slowly and surely all my parts are getting replaced. I am being rebuilt. I am also reminded that this is probably the antithesis of what my ex Narc would choose--pain leading you down a path of growth, change, and transition? No way. And so I remind myself to let the pain guide me toward the transformation that only this pain can build in me. I clutch tightly my beautiful future that will be all the more meaningful having been here.

Three Babies

Sometimes I ask myself precisely how many times I can let go of the same thing over and over? Precisely, how many times can I pare down to less? I keep thinking I've given up almost everything. Indeed, letting go feels likes my perpetual lesson.

I let go of house and home.
I let go of those things I thought, necessary.
I let go of the parts of myself that I thought were core bits, but ultimately, not true.
I let go of material things.
I let go of friends and companions.
I let go of family.

And there is always more I realize I'm attached to.

There is always more to let go of.

And then there are some things you really shouldn't let go of, I tell myself. 

And so I don't. I won't.

Like my three babies.

Each of these my three babies I will carry with me.
For myself I ask no one else to be mother to these three.
And of course I'm like a wild horse
But there's no other way to be.
Water and feed are not things that I need
For the thing that I've chosen to be.
In my soul
My blood and bones
I have wrapped your cold bodies around me.
The face on you
The smell on you
will always be with me.

And this is the manipulating point my Narc knows.

He knows my love for them means I will not ever abandon them to him.

Each of these my three babies.

I let go of all else, but.

Pilgrimages

(To get us through on this journey a poem by R.S. Thomas)

There is an island there is no going

to but in a small boat, the way

the saints went, traveling the gallery

of the frightened faces of

the long-drowned, munching gravel

of its beaches. So I have gone

up the salt lane to the building

with the stone altar, and the candles

gone out, and kneeled and lifted

my eyes to the furious gargoyle

of the owl that is like a god

gone small and resentful. There

is no body in the stained window

of the sky now. Am I too late?

Were they too late also, those

first pilgrims? He is such a fast

God, always before us, and

leaving as we arrive.

There are those here

not given to prayer, whose office

is the blank sea that they say daily.

What they listen to is not

hymns, but the slow chemistry of the soil,

that turns saints’ bones into dust,

due to an irritant of the nostril.

There is no time on this island.

The swinging pendulum of the tide

has no clock; the events

are dateless. The people are not

late or soon; they are just

here, with only the one question

to ask, which life answers

by being in them. It is I

who ask. Was the pilgrimage

I made to come to my own

self, to learn that, in times

like these, and for one like me,

God will never be plain and

out there, but dark rather, and

inexplicable, as though he were in here?

-R.S. Thomas

chosen

Over and over on this journey out of the fog, I've had the sense that I did not choose this path. It's as if I woke up one day and finally saw the reality of my life. My relationship with the narcissist, finally struck me as the non-relationship that it was. I saw that I was staring at the projected shadows on the back wall of Plato's Cave. (If you knew me, you'd know exactly how ironic that analogy is.) I woke up in the middle of a nightmare only to find that what I thought was a mere dream that I needed to awaken from yet again--a dream within a dream as it were--was the real nightmare of this world of being connected to a narcissist. On and on it has persisted as the reality I am in that I cannot wake up from further. The exhaustion point in fighting it has set in and still it goes on. And thus the feeling percolates that I didn't really choose this path. I keep trying to wake up out of said nightmare. But I am awake. I never chose to be one of those people who always chooses to awaken and face the fucked up reality over persisting in living in some false dreamworld created by some narcissistic delusion. But I am one of those people. I will always choose awakening. In spite of all the work and grief and hell and turmoil to endure. No, I'm one who always chooses the red pill over the blue pill. And perhaps that is why, I've never entirely felt like I chose this path. Rather, for some reason this path chose me.

And it keeps choosing me.

Odd as it sounds, that thought gives me comfort. In some sort of fucked up-ed-ness, I cling to that.

Snake Eyes

If only I could erase the tree of knowledge that came from that look. The look that I perpetually go back to. The look that instagrammed the relationship into one cohesive picture for all parts of me to observe.

That split second that almost seemed to bleed all moments of the past 20 years into one.

Somehow in that look my destiny juxtaposed the Red-Seas-of-my-Egyptian-escapism versus the-slavery-isn't-so-bad bit next to one another. And in that moment, my escape route was hatched. Right down the middle of the walled off sea. The look that was able to break through into my own deluded mind, causing some sort of contrecoup injury to my jostled brain.

I might be choosing a drowning death of the Sea by leaving.

But those frozen far off eyes told me of another death. It wasn't the one I had always thought. It wasn't the pat answer I thought. I realized there must have been a soul murdering way back in the past. For those eyes stared out of a body that had no soul.  

That frozen framed moment crystallized "the why" so that I could mount the courage to enter the threatening Sea that might drown me. The why for how to choose your own death.

That look revealed my real choice was caught in the space between the slow agonizing death of my soul or the accidental death in my escape in crossing the Sea.

The relationship was already dead. There was no resurrection of it. I was holding up a giant empty shell and though already dead, my holding it threatened to kill me--my soul. I had to stab the shell, in order to live or die more authentically.

I looked into the eyes of my own death dream and I vowed that dying in the act of soul preservation was indeed the sort of death worth living your whole life for. And so I stabbed the giant snake.