What is family for 500

Dear Catharsis,

This one is a hard one to define for me. On one had I have my own experiences of a fractured, disparate family that ceased to eat dinner with each other or rarely did much in the way of family activities after a while. On the other hand I have a girlfriend, who has a very tightly knit family, who despite the disfunction that is inherent in all families has been--for me--the model of what a family is, and how they interact.

I have never been particularly close to my family, by choice. I can finally admit that now. I chose to distance myself from my family. In many ways I am very okay with that decision. In others I feel like there is something from my childhood that is missing. But I made my choice and I am standing by that decision even now, because there is a chance to make something new. I am trying to reconnect with a sister, who despite sharing a house and school with each other, I consider an estranged sibling. But, I am looking at what I do have and what has carried me through life as more of a family as well. My nearest and dearest friends, whom I love with all my heart are very much a second family and when we are together, we are very much unstoppable and we always fall together, into each other like tent poles. Always supporting, stronger together than apart. But, due to distance and the beginning of life's third movement, they too are starting to create their own families. Some more than others, but there are flashes of things to come becoming visible.

But, most importantly, I have someone so incredibly special in my life, she has fast become a foundation for the family that I have always dreamt of. I don't necessarily mean in the kids, dog, white picket fence version of the family, although I am sure I would like to have that sort of family eventually. I am mean in the sense of something deeper that nothing physical can outwardly explain or show. Deep, deep down, she has tapped into a part of me that when I was younger did not think I would ever experience. I have watched movies, read books, listened to music that have described the one true thing that truly makes a family a family.

Unconditional love.

Love that you want to give and have no trouble showing. Love that is received equally without having to even look in its direction. It is both given and received. Wonderful and cruel. It makes you want to be a better person. It ensures that you will do absolutely anything for that person even at personal expense and sacrifice.

I know my parents love me and my sisters unconditionally, but I did not reciprocate those feelings growing up. I am and will continue to try to create that feeling between myself and my sisters. My friends and I have always had that unconditional love for each other, but even it has its limits. I have seen in the person that turned out to be the love of my life, what a family really is. I know what I to fight for, and I actually have a better sense of the message conveyed in all of those movies, books and songs. But even she is still half of the nucleus of a family.

I have to be included to. I am apart of all of these families and I am apart of the family that I want to build. Drawing from all three sources I have to be involved. There in lies my struggle. I have to love myself unconditionally.

And so Catharsis, I am not going to fight with myself anymore. The more I fight myself the more I harm my family. It is time I accept myself and all of my flaws as well as my gifts. These last 8 months have been the biggest struggle of my life and it is still uphill. But, not only have I seen the growth of my family before, I have experienced for a brief time. No more "Ain't no sunshine when she's gone attitude." It's high time for a, "working my way back to you..." attitude. I am working my way back to my family, my love, but mostly to myself.

I was asked a few weeks ago, what 10 year old me would think of me now. I knew he would be less than thrilled. But it is time to make 10 year old me proud. So I am standing up. I will become a part of the nucleus of the family I have always dreamed of having. First, I have to say thank you. Thank you to Rachel, Pat, Lisa, Mike, Katie, Raven, Felicity, my parents, Rachel's parents. Thank you for the help, the pain, the support, all of it--good and bad. But I am going to fight now. You can step back, you will not be crutch and cast anymore.

Laundry in winter

Dear Catharsis,

There are a few things I am pretty confident in. 1) Nobody likes doing laundry. 2) The farther away you are from a washer and dryer directly correlates to how soon you actually do your laundry before you run out of underwear and socks. 3) White's always suffer because there is never enough to justify a full load. 4) The Laundromat is the most depressing place in the world. 6) Getting up earlier than normal just to do laundry is one of the worst possible ways to spend a morning.

I would like to add that if having to trudge to the laundromat is terrible. BUT it is far worse when you have to trudge to the laundromat extra early, when it is 31 degrees and there are 42 mph gusts of wind which make it actually feel like it is 18 degrees outside. Worst laundry experience ever.

A fork in the road

Dear Catharsis,

Total shutdown today. I hit a fork in the road and feel like I am traveling down both. On one fork I have no opinion, feel next to nothing, and just generally ignore anything. On the other fork, I want to fight everything, and beg to feel everything. I don't care enough to get into the fight that I crave. So you know what I did? I drank. I walked down to the bottle shop, and I bought two bottles of Merlot. I had about a glass of Red left in the apartment and I drank that too. I have one bottle left. It seemed easier than trying to get into a fight today. This has happened before....

I was in 7th or 8th grade I think. Whatever year I started taking Muni home because I couldn't stomach another moment in Ms. Kerwin's car, and my father was pretty much living in the basement and rarely left. So I would take the bus.

One day, for one reason or another, I missed the bus. I probably had detention that I either had my dad sign off on, because it was clear he did not care, or I forged his signature on. I don't remember which. Besides detention was no different from study hall at Rooftop anyway. Anyway, I didn't feel like waiting for the next one so I walked from Burnett St. down to Market and Castro to catch the L home. I was in a particularly bad way at this point. This was at the height of the time that people had taken to calling me "Mulatto." But on this particular day--it was sunny--I was stopped by a kid on the street. He was about high school age I think. Anyway this kid stopped me on the street and asked me one time it was. I told him I didn't know, which was the truth. I have always hated wearing watches because they make my wrist itch, and I just pick at the watch all day; and I didn't own a cell phone until after I was in college.

The kid then said, "okay. Then give me your wallet." That I did have on me, there was not much in it. Enough to get a slice at Marcello's and get home. But, I refused to give it to him. I had had enough. I was tired of being picked on, made fun of, beaten up. So I refused. In fact, I looked him straight in the eye and simply said no. I didn't move. I just stared. It felt like an eternity, and I was honestly about to move on, when the kid pulled out a knife and repeated, "give me your wallet."

I have to pause here for a second. The fork in the road that I am at right now has little regard for human life. To be specific, my life. I am not nearly far enough down the road to want to end it myself. I have not been down there for quite some time, but at this stage on the road, I wouldn't mind if something should...happen. Anyway that was the point I was at that day in middle school so many years ago.

Again I told the kid, 'no.' To which he threatened to hurt me if I didn't. Never taking my eyes off of him. I told him to do it. I told him to stab me and that it was the only way he was going to get my wallet. I was very calm, and I was very serious. But, I did not stop there. I told him he would be doing me a service, by trying to kill me (at the time I thought this to be true). I even went as far as taking a step towards him. While I was at school and being picked on, I was never this calm, collected or fearless. Something inside me had snapped. I just stopped caring altogether about my well-being and had accepted whatever would ever happen. But the kid with the knife started to back away. I don't think he expected that. The kid high tailed it out of there and I went home. I had no emotion towards the whole thing and forgot about it. Never told anyone. It never boosted my self-confidence or self-esteem, as I was still picked on at school and never fought back.

The point of that story is, I feel the exact same way right now. And tomorrow is game one of the NLCS where my hometown Giants will be facing my current town Phillies. I will be rooting for the Giants and I am anticipating some verbal abuse. But right now, based on the way I feel, there could be a fight. Someone (probably me) could get hurt. And I do not have the slightest care in the world. We will see how this ends up.

Warning beware of what you read here, but read it gently

Dear Catharsis,

So this has been a long time coming and this is probably one of the harder posts to write I think. But while I have the courage and the inspiration to write it, I damn well better do it.

To put it bluntly I am depressed. I suffer from depression. I have for as long as I can remember. I did not have a happy childhood in the broadest sense of the idea of a happy childhood. Sure, my parents always provided for me even when it was nearly impossible to do so. I always had a roof over my head and food to eat. So, yes, I was better off than a lot of people. But in the whole Maslow's-Hierarchy-of-Need sense of my childhood, my development stopped somewhere between Love/belonging and Esteem. Okay so stopped is not necessarily the best way to describe it. But that is definitely where it got wonky. Incomplete would be better I suppose. Where and what I lacked in the love/belonging and esteem portions of the hierarchy, shaped and/or deformed my self-actualization. Hence, I suppose, is the source of the depression. (Sidebar: this is actually starting to sound oddly rational and logical, and I am not trying to rationalize how I feel here, suffice it to say I need to step away from Maslow. Nevertheless there is a diagram below for your visual pleasure.)
There were several factors that have definitely ruined my self-esteem, self-confidence, and my morality, creativity etc and so forth. Some of those being the harassment and abuse I faced at school, the abuse that I faced in the home (emotional/psychological and physical). When I was younger I didn't exactly have anyone to turn to, and certainly nobody that I trusted enough to explain any of this or help me make sense of it. My father was like a vacant room at a motel, he was there with just the bare essentials to give him the look of a father, but nothing even remotely personal. My mother was a wreck, depressed, and I suspect suicidal, but my suspicions have never fully been confirmed about that one. Until high school the friends that I had were only friends based on the pretext that if I hung around with a few people I was less likely to be physically harassed at school. Though the emotional harassment never ceased. So, I had no one to speak to and I did the only thing I knew how to preserve myself. I bottled up, hid away in plain site, and spoke of nothing. Even when I did, I felt unheard. I did, however, become an observer, and this is where my self-actualization began. I knew I was not happy, because I did not look or act like anyone else. I knew more about my family situation than I let on, I knew more in school than I actually let on. I figured applying myself would only make me more visible and thus that much more of a target. Instead I settled for being called bright, but lazy by all of my teachers, by my parents. I knew I wasn't stupid and I knew I was perfectly capable do doing every task, homework assignment, whatever was placed before me, but there was a mental block that prevented me from doing so, one that I placed there. One that I have paid for ever since, but one that has lead me down a path I never would have considered way back then.

I didn't let a single person near me. I played dumb. I ran through the motions of each day and "played" the part that I felt I most fit in and thereby felt most comfortable. I did this for so long I stopped and bottled so much up that, I stopped feeling much of anything. Sadness, happiness and everything in between all felt sort of muted or filtered out by something. So even the best and worst times in my life, became something to forget. That is exactly what I did. I did my best to forget.

The other day when I was thinking about how to go about writing this, I realized, I don't remember my father moving out of the house. I don't remember the day, I don't remember if I even helped him pack. I only have some grey area of when it happened and even that could be wrong. In my memory he was there and then he wasn't, either way it didn't make much difference. The same fights happened, the same sort of odd motel-like parenting happened. It just happened at a distance, and that is what I remember and even that is all fuzzy.

The point is, I became so good at forgetting, bottling, dismissing. I didn't realize what was happening to me. I didn't realize it when I jumped out my bedroom window. I didn't realize it when I tried to cut my wrists. I didn't realize it when I tried to take swallow as many pills as I could and ended up in the ER. I knew there was a word for it. I knew that it was me. Hell, I even used it to describe how I felt, and why there was this terrible weight pressing against my cheast on a daily basis, and why there were days when I could not get out of bed, or could not sleep. There was always a disconnect between me and depression. I suffered from, I was afflicted with (however you want to say it) depression. But looking back I could never come to terms with the fact that I was depressed. I tried to create some sort of barrier between me and the term. The term carried something with it that I didn't want. This is something that I still struggle with today.

All summer I tricked myself into thinking things were looking up, things were getting better. Things were going to change. I ignored the weight. I ignored others if I thought it would help. I am still not coping with things, at least not coping well. I have overcome some of the problems I created when I was younger, but I am still depressed. It affects me and it affects my relationships.

My mother tries to help, and I know she means well. But the honest bit of it is. She cannot help me yet. I still have not reconciled her role in my childhood. But she is not the only one. My sisters and my father especially are not reconciled with either. I am making small steps, but I know I have to be in the right place first before I can finally get closure from my family. Which, I know makes a vicious feedback loop. But, I know now, deep down that I have to find myself before I can fully make my return to my family, which in my mind I emotionally and psychologically left somewhere between 45th and 42nd avenue in San Francisco. I have a lot of ground to cover there, but I know and hope that I will get there someday. But this goes far beyond forgiveness. This is about understanding. But like I said I have to understand myself.

Fortunately, I have someone who has been helping me along, whether she realizes it or not. I can safely say that I love her unconditionally, and even though she is halfway around the world. She has been my inspiration, because, she has opened up to me and shown me how she has overcome her own issues. I know she is not completely over them either, but I hope that we can continue to figure those things out together for a very long time. Deep down I know that, and even though it comes from a comedy movie it is true that, "True love is your soul's recognition of its counterpoint in another." I feel that with her and I know it is made stronger by previous hardship. I am lagging behind her, but she has been more than patient, forgiving and empathetic, and there is no way that I will ever be able to thank her enough for what she has given me and what she has done for me whether she knows it or not. But I also understand that she can only do so much, and that she can only support me on a journey that I will have to overcome on my own. I love you Rachel, and this is as much an apology as it is a profession of my love for you, because you never bargained for having to deal with my depression. But you have stood up admirably and you have been patient, tolerant, supportive, and critical at all the right times and I want to do this as much for myself as I do for you because I honestly feel that you have become part of me.

So with that I am my next step is to be as open and honest as I can, first to myself, and with all of my relationships. This is my start and I am scared shitless.

About a boy

Dear Catharsis,

Sometimes people just say things so much better than I can.

"Clive carried on moaning in the car. Why did Marcus want to get involved with someone like that? Why hadn't he tried to stop her? Why had he been so rude to Lindsay? What had she ever done to him? Marcus didn't answer. He just let his father go on and on until eventually he seemed to run out of moans like you run out of petrol: they started to slow up and get quieter, and then they just disappeared altogether. The thing was, he couldn't be that kind of dad anymore. He'd missed his moment. It was like if God suddenly decided to be God again a zillion years after creating the world: he couldn't suddenly come down from heaven and say, oh, you shouldn't have put the Empire State building there, and you shouldn't have organized it so that African people get less money, and you shouldn't have let them build nuclear weapons. Because you could say to Him, well, its a bit late now isn't it? Where were you when we were thinking of these things?

It wasn't as though he thought his dad should have been around, but he couldn't have it both ways. If he wanted to be up in Cambridge, with Lindsay, smoking pot and falling off window ledges, fine, but he couldn't then start picking up on the little things--and Ellie was a little thing now really, even though when they'd seemed like the biggest thing ever. He'd have to find another job for himself. Will could do the little things, and his mum, but his dad was out of it."

Thank you Nick Hornby.

Doing laundry after college

Dear Catharsis,

Doing laundry after college is easily the single most significant detail of life that is taken for granted while in college. Right up to the day of graduation, I always had relatively easy access to doing laundry, be it in my parents house, my aunt's house or a short walk downstairs and across the courtyard to the laundry room. Everyone bitched and moaned about how expensive it was to do laundry, but looking back I guess we were paying for the convenience.

After college, doing laundry is the pinnacle of being alone. There is nothing more depressing, more lonesome that getting up packing up your clothes trudging down the street--which in my case is about a fifteen minute walk--and do laundry next to people whose silence speaks volumes about how they don't want to be where they are, do not want to speak to you unless its to find out if the machine next to you is vacant, and you pretty much feel the same way.

Doing laundry is nothing like going shopping, which I have been told, is the best place to meet someone. The shopping cart can be very telling about a person's lifestyle and personality. A laundry basket can be just as revealing but you don't really want to know what it has to show you.

Tomorrow is my first official day in Philadelphia completely on my own, as the one contact (read: friend--I am not that cold hearted) will be returning to college where he can do laundry from the confines of the secluded Guilford campus. He has shown me a great deal of Philly and I am excited to branch out and meet new people. But at the same time, I am growing weary of it. It seems ever since high school I have had to make a new batch of friends every other year or so and to be quite honest I am tired of doing it. I miss my friends from San Francisco, I miss my friends from Greensboro, I miss my girlfriend, who is working in South Korea and seems to have had no trouble making friends with people who she can go out and have a drink with or go on adventures with. I am not bitter about that at all, I am very happy for her, but at the same time I have only met people in passing and the people I could hang out with work for me and I am forced to respect the distance of work and out of work relationships. At least I have the Exchequer but even she in all of her manic, kitten-intense energy can drive me crazy. But I am still happy to have her.

Oh well, let's see what tomorrow brings, and let's see how much I enjoy the one thing I have asked for my entire life...To be completely alone.

Nobody is well adjusted after college

This one is going to be short and to the point. I am fucked up. I have been for a while. This is my semi-public attempt at coming clean about a few things. I won't tell anybody about this blog but if they find it...well, given what I have to say. It will not be pretty. Refreshing isn't the right word but it's the first that comes to mind, if I can pay homage to Chuck Palahniuk.

At any rate this is going to be a tell-all, dirty laundry airing, catharsis of a blog. In fact, I am going to write each post to Catharsis, and Catharsis, whomever it may be will learn all about the true story of my life, the good, the bad, the ugly, but mostly the bad, in the hopes that maybe things might get better and maybe I can get adjusted after college. Maybe I can get adjusted in a way that I have never been able to achieve my entire life. So here it goes....

Dear Catharsis......