Tag Archives: courage

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Everything’s Coming Up Wrenches

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So, our friends over at lappingthecouch.uk have done us one better in the quest to make mental illness more understandable to everyone. I’d say how irritated that made me, but the author is a friend of mine whom I’ve not seen in roughly a decade and a half, and also, her post was amazingly well written. I just hate it when anyone is more articulate than me. I’m including the link to her post “Sunday was not a fun day” so that you guys can go and check it out. It’s worth the time. Go. Do it. I’ll wait here. Back? Cool.

I’m not going to write a counterpoint, going in-depth about Bi-Polar, as that would take away some of your attention from what she had to say. Also, a while ago, I posted “The Midnight Hour”, which, despite being eighteen years old, is still a fairly accurate, if metaphorical, take on my illness. Some day I may have to sit down and dole out some examples, but I’ll tell you right now that I probably won’t do justice to the swings of mania, as to me, they just seem like I’ve finally gotten back to normal. But, again, that’s not why I’m plugging Tiffany’s blog. Maybe someday in the future when we’re both writer-types with massive egos we can totally start an international feud (Actually, that sounds like a lot of fun, and a great way to spend the summer!), but for now I will just say that I think the writing is excellent, and I’m enjoying reading what she’s got to say.

But the thing about her blog, is that it actually serves a purpose. She wants to not only have a record of her goals, a written self-proclamation of all which she might hope to (reasonably) accomplish, but wants to offer up a human face to problems that others may also have come to endure. That is one of the most important things to remember, not just if you’re suffering from a mental malady, but as a human being in general: You are not alone. As we grow more interconnected with the world through the use of information technology, we substitute digital interactions for face to face time with actual people. More and more gets taken out of context as the nuance of language is rapidly being lost, and people are letting basic social niceties fall into disuse, as the implied anonymity of the internet divests the user of any sense of repercussion, and encourages less filtering of one’s behavior. This leads to more truth, I believe, hidden among the teenaged bravado, as even in one’s fantasies do his prejudices shine. But it also robs of us of our evolved ability to actually function in the real world.

I use Facebook, and before that, I was rocking MySpace. I don’t know that I’ve made more than a couple of friends on social media, but the point for me was to stay in touch with people I had once known, and allow myself moments of nostalgia. But now if I want to see how someone is doing, I just scan through their posts to make sure they’re still around. I can’t actually remember the last time when I called someone up just to shoot the breeze, outside of my family or Bad Leon. As for meeting up with folks and doing the whole hanging out in person thing? I think it was the wedding which my wife and I attended in mid-November. I’m not going to be too tough on myself for that one, though, as making friends is hard, and I’m separated from both of my best friends by hundreds of miles and a couple states. And even if I do make a friend, it’s not like I’ll really make the time for them. I mean, sure, at the beginning of the friendship, I’ll stop doing something else, and this new buddy and I will be practically inseparable. But then I will come to notice that I’ve been letting other things go to pasture, and soon enough this new friend will join the pile of old friends whom I have discarded in a pile over in the corner. Note: I do not actually have a pile of people in the corner. This was a metaphor.

Okay, I might not be the poster boy for social interaction. Still, I must admit that when I’ve spent some time in the company of people whom I don’t entirely despise, I come back feeling better for the effort. The echoes bouncing around this head of mine hit a little softer when there’s someone there to cushion the blow.

Looking back at everything I’ve written today, I realize that I allowed myself to drift off the topic I had originally planned to tackle: Making goals. I am horrible at laying out a plan as I have most likely shared with you too many times too count. I like to be prepared for every eventuality, but only in a general sense. I think the one thing that Tiffany is doing which I could never do (besides being a good spouse to her significant other), is letting other people in on my secret hopes and dreams. I can lay out a grand plan with broad strokes and hype it up with obfuscation and bravado, but I’m terrified to share the simple steps I’m too paralyzed by fear to take. You may have noticed I use humor, or indignation, or humorous indignation, to get at what I’m trying to say. I developed this writing for a reason. Inside my head, I’m a drastically different person than the meatbag which is typing.

In here, I’m all confidence and swagger, the master of my domain. But put me in a room with anybody else, and all I can think of is, “What if I’m wrong? What if I sound stupid? What if they laugh at me?” It’s easier to handle a sudden chortle if that was your intention. To lay yourself out bare before the world and receive back only ridicule? Hence the snarky outrage.

“What if they laugh at me?” Since I was old enough to shave (you know, like 12-13), I’ve been professing to the world that I don’t care what other people think, all the while checking their reactions to see if they think my outburst somehow made me cooler. Now that I’m in my mid-thirties, I can honestly say that I’m less concerned with what other people believe about me, and more worried with what they believe about almost anything else. I’m bald. I’m fat. I’m not entirely sure why anyone has ever bedded me, but they’ve all said it was because I’ve made them laugh (which causes me to worry that they’re all using the same euphemism to belittle my- well, you get the idea). I’ve almost accepted who I am. At least, I’ve realized that I’m too stubborn to really change. And yet… And yet the notion that someone might single me out for ridicule chills my very blood. I’m going to share something ridiculous with all of you:

I cannot make phone calls to people I don’t know. Just can’t. No cold calls for Tex Batmart. My brain just freaks out any time I have to speak to someone that I haven’t met. I used to think this only applied to when I used to call up girls in high school (let me reiterate that I was also in high school when I was calling high school girls), and the fear seemed justified, as not only could they reject me, but they could mock me to their friends, ensuring that no one would ever want to be my girlfriend. Even worse, her father could pick up the phone, and demand to know who I was and where I lived and what my intentions with his daughter were. Fear just seemed like the most appropriate response. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had the fortune to be liberated from the need to speak my girlfriends’ fathers, but now the terror encompasses every other telephonic interaction. Thank god for online ordering, or I’d never get a pizza delivered. And online bill payment? The best thing since Betty White. I seriously have to work myself up into a lather (of anger- it’s not like I’m phoning from the shower) just to call up Comcast and ask them why I can’t watch BBC America. I apologize to the Customer Service reps at Amazon on the rare occasions that I’ve had to call them! And don’t make me tell you what happens when my wife passes me the phone when she’s chatting with her mother.

I know that there is literally nothing that the people on the other end of the line can do to me. I mean, they can hang up, or if they become abusive, I can. All they can say is “no.” So why am I terrified every time the phone rings from a number that I don’t know? No, seriously tell me. I let every number with which I am unfamiliar go to voice mail. And half the time I hold the phone away from my ear like I’m afraid of the recording! It may seem like I am making light of the suffering of others, using a ridiculous example to garner laughs. And that is why I don’t share my inner feelings with other people. Look how much rambling on it took to get to the root of it. Seriously, scroll up! And this is why I’m drawing attention to my friend, Tiffany’s blog, Transformation in Progress: from caterpillar to butterfly… I hope. With a courage that I cannot hope to emulate, she just jumped right in and laid it on the table. No filler. No hedging. No dissembling. She wrote about what she felt she needed to in the hopes that writing it would lessen its hold on her, and maybe help someone else who didn’t know where to turn.

Thank you, Tiffany. You’ve reminded me of all that I have yet to do. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, and I hope that I might borrow a little of your courage, from time to time.

-Tex

Also,  in case you are wondering about the title, it comes from an experience in high school. I was directing a play for Drama class, and at a rehearsal, Fed had to sit in and read for one of my actors. One of the lines was about using roses for inspiration, but Fed decided to substitute wrenches. I could have told this story better, but I might want to save it for a later post.

Sportsball

Sportsball Wrap-Up: The Jaws of Victory

“It was a nice run, Kev. Had to close out someday. Nobody wins them all.”

In the stunning aftermath of yet another Russell Wilson victory over a Super Bowl winning quarterback (this time, himself), I find myself wanting to wallow in the unanswered questions which followed that game. But, along this run of improbable successes, I seem to have lost sight of the fact that I am a Seattle sports fan, and yesterday’s game was not the anomaly. Sure, I have snarky remarks that I could use to turn this into a caustic, laugh-so-you-don’t-cry piece, but the truth is that I am still proud of my team. Unlike last season, where a run to the Super Bowl looked unstoppable, and the Lombardi Trophy, a foregone conclusion, this season was heart and soul. It seemed that going into mid-November, the curse of the Super Bowl champions was nestled snugly upon us, and we could look forward to next year. And then this team of Sportsball heroes that nobody else seemed to want decided that they they didn’t want to go whimpering off into the night. They won every game left, and strode into the postseason, looking like the championship team we’d seen the year before. And even after the first three quarters of the NFC Championship, where it looked like all hope was lost, they managed to pull off a comeback that even the Seahawks’ faithful would have been hard-pressed to imagine.

There have been calls for a certain offensive coordinator’s head on a silver platter. And honestly, with the judgement shown with that final call, it might be an idea worth revisiting. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is Seattle team, and sooner or later, something like this was bound to happen. The Seahawks are now 1-2 on the big stage, and don’t have another chance to go after back-to-back championships for another two years, at least. The Patriots walked away with yet another victory, and it looks like the team that best personified the Bush era isn’t quite ready to fade into that long night. But Seattle should hold its head up high: there will be other chances for athletic glory, and Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger aren’t going to be around forever. The Seahawks have given the city of Seattle something to unite behind, and we will stand with them, good times or bad.

A friend of mine posted that she’d like to see them given a parade, despite the loss. I’m sure that the rest of the country would mock us for not knowing how parades are supposed to work, but I think it’s a wonderful idea. We have all had days where we just couldn’t get it done, professional missteps that we’d rather no one knew about. The lucky thing for the rest of us, is that when we screw up, it’s usually not on a global stage. We quickly look around to make sure that no one saw us, and then do our best to make sure that something like that can’t ever happen again. It’s too easy to say you’re with someone through thick and thin, and then want to pile on when they seem hell-bent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. I’m fairly certain that there is nothing that any of us can say that will make anybody on that team feel worse than they do already. But with the narrative against them, and criticism bubbling up from everyone who saw the game, and knows they would have called it better, perhaps it’s time to tell our team something that they haven’t heard: Thank you.

And no, not the sarcastic mumbled thanks that spill out of one’s mouth like a toddler forced to apologize, but a genuine offer of gratitude for the simple joys we’ve been provided throughout the past few years, with a touch of sympathy, because we’re human beings, and not just raging animals. On one of the worst days of your life, it’s not uncommon for everyone to seem lined up against you. But sometimes just a simple reassurance from someone who matters to you, or even just a well-meaning stranger, can make all the difference. I’m aware that this is just a requiem for Sportsball, and that there are so many other things that deserve our full attention. But I’ve also spoken in the past of the banality of evil, and how the world might be a better place if we could just keep trying to fill it with random acts of kindness. So let’s start today, and never let it fade. Let’s stand together as the Twelfth Man and show that we support one another. It’s the easiest thing in the world to knock someone down a peg, but if there are enough us, we might manage some heavy lifting, and bring them back up again.

There are those who say that to survive in a world of ubiquitous terrorism, we must be just as ruthless as those who seek to do us harm. We must bend the rules which bind our hands, and keep us from our victory. We’ve all been hearing it for thirteen years, and, like trickle-down economics, I’m pretty sure it’s been debunked. I mean, yes, we can probably gain success against those who might do us harm if we toss out all civility. But those rules are not in place to protect the people we are up against: they are to protect us from ourselves. The “enemy combatant” who is spared from torture is probably relieved, I’m sure. But the moment we decide that we are above the very laws we’ve put in place, and seek vengeance because justice has eluded us, we are no better than those who seek to do us harm; actually, as they have no illusions about what is that they are doing, and why they have been doing it, it makes us worse. We will be hurt. People will take advantage of us. There will be times when we will lose. But we will not let the sting of failure keep us down, nor the seeming futility of goodness rob us of our decency. We will stand up for that which we believe in, and keep standing until the light, and all which it has come to represent, has driven back the shadows, not only from ourselves, but from everyone frightened by the night.

-Tex

Family

What Kind Of Day Has It Been?

I came up to Bainbridge Island to spend Christmas with my family, as it could very well be my final opportunity. I don’t regret moving out of state, falling in love, and starting a family of my own, but each time I’ve come home to visit, I cannot help but notice how unkind that time has been. When you spend an extended period in the company of another, the changes which remold them are so gradual you really cannot see them. But when I left home, my grandparents were both active senior citizens. They couldn’t do all of the things which they once they had been able, but they were still the same people I had always known, and I figured that they could stick around indefinitely. I never felt the need to worry, safe in the knowledge that they were still years away from the age my great grandmother had been when she passed away. My first couple of trips back, I really didn’t notice any significant changes, maybe just an extra wrinkle here or there, but essentially they were unchanged.

Then the reports came in from my mother that the both of them had truly begun deteriorating, and I started to believe that I was running out of chances to come and see them. And before I knew it, they had somehow joined the ranks of the terribly and officially ancient. They have become, in the time I’ve been away, just paper dolls shaped like people that I used to know. I’ve seen the bite marks that the jaws of time have left upon them as it tore out ragged chunks of organ functionality and even their sense of self. I look at pictures taken back before I moved, and marvel at how young each and every one of appeared. My passage through the stream of time has come upon the rapids, and the landmarks have begun to blur. The years are gone before I know it, leaving only brief impressions, and I long to hold on to everything just a little longer, pause this moment for forever and never have to let them go.

I’ve complained that on my visits, I never get to go and have any of the fun that I’ve been putting off since the last time when I put it off from earlier. The truth is that, yes, I have neglected several friends that live on the other side of the water (and even some that live here on the Island), but it isn’t like some unbearable punishment, like it might have been when I was just a kid. Normally, I’m just up here for a week or so, and by the end of that vacationary stretch, I’m eager to be on my way. It’s easy to remember all the reasons why I left, petty arguments and the notions of being bound by rules merely by residing under someone else’s roof. But this has been a true vacation, both from work, and life itself. There’s nothing that I left behind this time that can’t live without me just a little longer. Except…

To not knowing how to smile for a school photo.
To not knowing how to smile for a school photo…
Leading the revolution at just a couple of weeks old.
Leading the revolution at just a couple of weeks old.

On the other side of the divide of time, there stand two little boys, as ravaged and consumed by aging as those I came to see. Of course, no one really sees the process at the other side of that same coin, we just call it “growing up,” but it’s just as fundamental of a change.

Between the moments captured in these photos, lay seven and a half years of my little boy’s life. In that time he has become an entirely different person at least a dozen times over, and yet the thread of his existence connects these two to make the same sweet person that I’ve come to know. But the truth remains that in blink, my baby boy was gone, replaced by someone new that I’d had a hand in shaping, and yet needed to get to know once more.

And then there is my grandson, who celebrated his second birthday just before we left. Each day he seems to learn something that he couldn’t fathom just the day before, and I’ve been lucky enough to see it happen right before my eyes. Even on the days when I only missed out on his company for the duration of my work day, I would invariably miss out on some new, adorable achievement. I cannot begin to fathom what I may have missed over the course of these past couple weeks. He’s probably begun speak in near-complete sentences, and learned to climb up and down the bookcases when his parents aren’t looking.

 

I’m not nearly ready to face what is inevitable: I know the sand is running down, and I haven’t much time left. I’m steeling myself against the day when I get that call I absolutely cannot bear to take. It was bad enough to lose someone that I loved, but never spent much time with. On the day I get that fateful call, I know that I’ll feel something breaking. I think that I might rather remain entirely oblivious, were it not for the certainty that I would tear myself apart in the days which followed, for not having done enough to prevent that which can never be avoided. So I wait, curled up into a little ball within myself, and hope that if I worry just enough, my fears might never come to pass.

My wife has been getting on my case for not engaging in more quality time with those I came to see, but I know that sooner than I’d care for, everything will suffer from a permanent rearrangement. So I’ve done my best to sink back into the role I played when I was younger, trying to make it all seem effortless, just like I had never left. It’s not that I am not aware of everything that’s changed, but I wanted my final memories spent in this place to resemble something close to normal, not the extended last goodbye that it could easily become. I want to be able to remember all the happiness to shield against the despair which I know will come.

This guy was so happy to have moved the hell out, and gotten started with his life,
This guy was so happy to have moved the hell out, and gotten started with his life.

-Tex

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Conversations in Time

I sometimes wonder how my younger self might judge me if he could meet the man that I’ve become, usually envisioning a heated discussion between my teenage and current selves. It had never occurred to me to travel further back in time to have a conversation with the boy who fell in love with writing and set his future out before him, until a game my son and I were playing earlier this evening. He was imagining that he was himself, now, in possession of a time machine, and that he’d come back along my timeline to meet me when I was his age. I, of course, played the role of my seven year old self as best I could, substituting obstructionism when my memories could not be accessed. It was a lot of fun, and I have to admit that I might have been on to something with the whole “undivided attention” thing I figured out yesterday.

But having a blast playacting a prior version of myself, and interacting with my time-travelling progeny forced me to come to terms with just how many of my previous temporal incarnations just might take issue with the choices I have made. Explaining to the boy my son met this evening that it would take 28 years until I actually did anything with the ability he’d just discovered and to which he’d already dedicated his life would be a disappointment. At that age, people in their twenties seem so grown up, and anyone over 30 is positively ancient! To tell him that he’d have to live 400% more just to get a shot might have discouraged me from even trying. Or it might have motivated me to get an earlier start. Honestly, it’s really hard to extrapolate my headspace from nearly three decades past. And this is only the first of many highlights as we travel along Tex Batmart through the ages.

 

Tex Batmart

Through The Ages

Age 8

A year later, I would have been crushed to discover that the first girl I ever kissed would not go on to be my wife, and even worse: within a year, she’d be moving out of my life forever! My utopia was coming to an end. No more escorting her to the bus stop in the mornings on the way to school, no more races along the street with her slightly younger brother. No more running off into the woods and teaching one another how to kiss like the grown-ups do. In terms of romance, this would mark the beginning of a particularly long period of loneliness in my life which would go on for another half-dozen years.

Age 14

I’d met a girl on the way home from school, and asked her parents if she could keep me. Seriously. She was pretty, funny, and she lived down on the beach! For her birthday that year, she invited me to her party at Skateland. I didn’t skate, but was super into her, so went along, and earned some serious Dad Glances from her father on the trip out there. Trying to warn myself any earlier would have been met with boredom and rebellion, so I would need to pull myself aside somewhere near the arcade, strongly urging barely teenage me against accepting the affections of a different girl at the party that night. He would, of course, ask why I cared (not bothering to question the paradox of my appearance, as he would remember from my previous visits six and seven years ago), and proceed to ignore me, as it would be proof he would be kissing a girl again, and even seeing boobs! Never underestimate the power of breasts upon a teenage boy’s mind. He would go on to kiss that girl, and see his first real life boobs since infancy. And then lose that girl, and then another, and then a few more after that. Having seen the uselessness of trying to prevent an adolescent from foolishness in his quest for romantic shenanigans, I would have to wait another couple years until I did something desperately in need of stopping.

Age 16

Skipping over the most impressively rebellious time in my life (January 1995), a time when only Trent Reznor could have soothed my inner turmoil, I would see my next opportunity for self-redemption in the late Spring of ’96. Again, my present self would be easily disregarded should I attempt to prevent him from doing anything short-sighted. There were things that had to happen (the records of which were expunged upon my 21st birthday), knowledge earned, and the groundwork laid for major events which would transpire six months hence. But I would have told myself that what I was going through: the searing clarity of emotional pain, the bursts of insight and inspiration, the nights of writing when I could almost taste an enduring literary legacy, these were symptoms of something called Bi-Polar Disorder. That although knowing that it was a chemical imbalance in my brain didn’t mean that everything I felt was in my head. And to hang on just a little longer, things were coming that would change it all. I’d give myself a hug, and fade forward to the beginning of June 1997.

Age 17

If you could go back and change anything in your life, would you? Are you willing to commit suicide, to erase the very person that you are, that you’ve become? This is the moment in my life in which I would be tempted to interfere. It was the beginning of Summer, 1997. Having almost completed my court-mandated punishment, and won over my Probation Officer, things were degenerating at home once more. I was more determined than ever to get out as soon as possible, and was making plans to leave as soon as I wouldn’t be imprisoned for leaving home. Things came to a head, and, through very little fault of my own, I was suddenly free… two weeks early… and in violation of the terms of my probation. I ran the situation by my P.O., and was granted a reprieve, assuming I could find somewhere new to live.

That summer, I fell in love with a woman just one year older than I am now. What began as simple companionship of Mrs. Robinson developed into my first adult relationship. And for a while I had everything I’d wanted. I was free of the tyranny of my Parental Unit, free of The Law, and living a life of domestic tranquility. I even had the good fortune to meet a boy who would grow into a decent young man, who allowed me to practice being a dad. I can honestly say that I didn’t have a lot of success, but I also didn’t manage to screw him up too terribly. I was happy. I was an equal of adults months early. I should have known better.

I’m not going to get into the particulars here: Eventually I’ll write a book about it, and actually do it justice. I will say that no other point in my life has influenced the creation of the man who I became more than the three years which followed. My innocence fell away, and I was forced to reconsider who I was and what kind of man I could and couldn’t tolerate becoming. To spare myself the pain which would define the era, would I give up everything I have now, including the wisdom earned from moments of overcome despair? I doubt I would have listened, for even if I believed myself, I was doing it for true love.

This thought experiment has taken on a rather melancholy aspect, and that was specifically what I was trying to avoid. I figured I’d have a few laughs at the juxtaposition of myselves, and call it a night. Suffice it to say that I would be forced to leave myself alone to face the world and wounds to come. But we’ve got one more stop to make.

Age 21

It’s now April 2001, and I’ve been out of the mental ward for a couple weeks. My relationship is deteriorating, and even I, Don Quixote, can read the writing on the wall. I don’t know it yet, but I’m about to move out of my apartment and leave the love of my life behind. I’ll only ever see her once more. This is the point where I might actually be able to listen to myself, hear what I would tell myself. More than any other impossible wish, I would sit down with myself over a Big Ass cup of coffee and a cigarette, and tell him this:

“I know you’re hurting right now, and nothing that I tell you will change that. There’s no point in telling you to wait for it to get better. Only time can tell you that with any credibility. But please know that it meant something; that everything you went through was for something. You’ll make plenty of mistakes, and do some things you’d rather not have done, but I can promise you that it does get better. You’re too smart for your own good, and all of your clever attempts at evasion only make the lessons you need to learn come and hit you harder. You will find someone, and barely have the sense to date her. She’ll put up with you for a few years, and then you’ll have to marry her to make her stay. The road ahead is hard, and it will feel like it will never end. But I swear to you, you will be happy! You just haven’t earned it yet. Be true, and step forward into world with your eyes finally open.”

I would watch my future self begin to dissipate, mulling the notion that I’d have to put up with this for who knew how long, when I heard that fat bald bastard say, “Oh, and just watch out for the super-hot Panamanian girl, she’s nothing but trouble!”

And that concludes another trip into The Vaults of Uncle Walt. It was a little darker than I intended, so I’m going to make you all a promise to keep it light tomorrow. Thank you again for joining me on this Great Adventure, and I look forward to seeing you here again!

From all the versions of myself, I wish you a pleasant evening.

-Tex