Forgiveness?

I'm pretty sure my Journey will be ending soon.  of a necessity. 

this is a picture of a faded 1935 Native/Buffalo nickel.  it is, i thought, one of my most valuable possessions.  don't know exactly where it came from, don't know how i got it.  but i love how perspective is gained, and it is an example of such.  as in, last year, when I looked up the median price for this thing, it was anywhere between 250 and several thousand dollars, depending on condition.  I'm assuming it would be the COVID-19, but when I investigated it this morning, on the advising of a friend, i saw the offering price on such a piece has diminished significantly.  and isn't that the way with the 'importance' of things?

has this anything to do with the Journey and me feeling it's time to bring this to a close?  absolutely.  but not the nickel. it's just a cool pic that i can use for relevance.  

"Do you think the grown you can ever forgive the child you for not being perfect?"

I'm sure this is a paraphrasing, but my counselor asked me that on Wednesday past.  a fair question and not out of left field at all.  it was asked in response to me alluding to my disconnect.  of all the fad terms of the past decade, I admit I have a fondness for that one, because it is how I've felt for a long time.  as if I'm just floating, barely grazing the familiar things and mostly enmeshed in the specter of strange worlds and atmospheres, though these are the places where I exist.  family, friends, acquaintances, past peoples...the only people who seem to have real dimension to me in the last several years of my life have been the ones already deceased.  even that last sentence is a revelation.  because I miss the hell out of Johnnie, my sponsor, now that he's died, but when he was dying, I couldn't bring myself to give him any significant time.  maybe failure ends where grief begins?  anyway, another example, I just got a text from a friend, her initials are SH, and I've stopped speaking to her because I missed a ZOOM meeting she set up for us for our Wednesday CA meeting.  well, I did not do the work that she didn't choose to do, which is contact all the other few people who attend, give them the information and make sure they tuned in.  so I got perceived attitude from her when I told her I got to the 'meeting' late, which I did because I was tending to my parents.  I got perceived attitude for 2 days, and then decided, to hell with this, living under someone's disappointment at this point in my life, and I just stopped checking on her.  that's my level of disconnect.  

"Do you think the grown you can ever forgive the child you for not being perfect?"

what a sad thought, that such should even be necessary.  But it can be, and it is for me.  

When I was a kid, I had a notion.  I've discovered this recently.  the notion was, if I do everything perfectly, if I just do everything the exact right way, then I could make my mom and dad not fight, I could make us all get along with each other, my mother, father, older and younger brothers.  no one else at that point, there were six of us in the house.  and I tried.  I tried to be a perfect student, and when i'd fall short i'd be grief-stricken.  this is at 5, six, seven years old.  i'd cry the whole day if I made a school mistake in front of my mother, and i'd come home and get beat for crying, and i'd perceive the beating as for crying and for making the mistake.  I taught myself to cook, and from my father, whom I figured if I could learn to cook well enough then my mom wouldn't have to worry about it and they would have time to be happy together, I got only criticisms because teaching yourself to cook means making a lot of mistakes.  I can kind of see it now; hard working man comes home to half-cooked food and a wife who's not doing any of the cooking and he gets angry wondering what the value of his labor really is.  But at that time, it was a drawn out failure.  I couldn't see the value of being able to teach myself to cook, I could only see the repeated disappointment my father felt.  I can say, honestly, that fed into both my insecurities and my eating disorder, and strangely, I never felt the need to stop cooking, just stopped trying to please anyone.  the secret cooking led to secret improvement and secret eating.  anesthesia.  numbing and pulling plugs and wires.  disconnecting.  

i'm not doing full details on this now. wash, rinse, repeat.  grade school was mostly trying to fit in, find some commonality, not show feelings when the numbing eating spilled over into dealing with the failure of fitting in.  junior high school brought drugs, great for disconnecting, and behavior issues, the grades falling off, and the attempt to disconnect from them as well, for which I'll always owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Herman Jackson, a football coach and teacher at East High school, who tutored me in Geometry in my 11th grade summer so I could graduate with my class.  I thank him because he knew I was having troubles and he tried to find a way to help me, and I never let him in, but he did try for real.  I can see that now.  and that was most of high school.  almost completely disconnected.  I didn't play football for coach Jackson, though he wanted me to, because I'd played pee-wee football and was forced to by a father I was taught to hate and learned I was a disappointment to, and also learned that at my size I would only end up on the offensive line and didn't want to play offense unless it was a receiver so I didn't choose to play.  

early onset intellectual idiot.  I was a brain who refused to think, I was raised as a jock but I refused to play.  drugs and alcohol were the only things I fully participated in, but I wasn't street so I wasn't really a burnout or a gangbanger. I was just lost. disconnected.  

etcetera, etcetera.

Here I am, at my kitchen table.  I'm eating a pancake with sugar free syrup and 3 scrambled eggs.  I love eggs.  age catches up to you. 16 years ago, I was the 'magnificent seven' breakfast eater at Perkins; full stack of pancakes, sausage, eggs, hash browns, leave bloated and sluggish.  now, a pancake and eggs.  soon, probably just a boiled egg and toast.  time moves on.  Am I immature now?  in many ways no, but in some, yes.  but at 52, should I be immature at all?  No.  Only compared to God and the mountains.  in human reckoning, i'm either middle aged or i'm verging on old.  cool.  I have a child I've been incubating in a bath of perceived failure and resentment.  resentment has to be accounted for.  because you can't keep a child alive inside your heart and mind unless you are feeding it something.  resentment, reaction to fear, so many negative things.  surrounded and swaddled.  and the question was, can I forgive him for not being perfect?  can I plug back into the past, the pain, the sorrow and fear and the twisted lessons, and cut that part of me free so it can go wherever the past is supposed to go? 

and of course, that's not really the question at all.  I can say that I know that much.  

the real question, if I am perceptive enough to discern is this:  am I capable of living in such a way that the child in me knows it is okay that I did not do everything perfectly?  

that's the crux.  because I can't plug back into all that old shit.  there's no way.  I don't believe i'd survive that, not in a quarantine, not in isolation.  i'm used to the aloneness, but only as a balancing act.  i'm not accustomed to sloshing emotions all over the place and trying to live with the mess.  hence, the disconnection.  but, so help me, that's what has been behind the gray wall.  did my brother expose himself to me when I was a child? yes.  was I raped or molested?  I don't believe so.  at least, not physically.  I was emotionally molested, by my intellect being twisted on other people's isms, by my parent's perpetual war, by my need for a fix as the condition of me being happy.  

Oh, I can.  I can do things to plug into today.  plugging into today will hopefully facilitate an awakening of my inner child (TOTI, to long-time readers...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!) to the fact that it's safe now.  and when I do those things, they must become habit, they have to become my personal 'new normal' which I hate as a term so I won't use it again but it is pertinent and resonates at the moment.  that is why the Journey is going to end soon, because writing as a Journey is only meant to happen until the real traveling begins.  

so, we're going to see, right?

Thank you, Father, for this lovely day so far.