Stepping Away and the Green Light

I’ve said this recently about this site, though I would like to, I will occasionally come back in with a post because of my affinity with people, the readers, and those I feel close to that might look for my writings.

I’ve struggled though of late with how helpful this site is in my own life. I have found over the years that writing allows me to express a part of myself that otherwise stays ruminating in my head. It is really difficult for me to step away from that reality. So I have created a new site, fresh start, an opportunity to record really what is real in my life today.

The site is: Personal Testimony if you are interested in stepping over there.

I’m in a place tonight where I often fantasize would be an easy way to take my own life. There are hindrances that I wish did not exist. I used to have others who openly cared about me, but I lose people and then hope in believing that I am a good person. I have fought this battle with myself for over 40 years, and in the midst of that forced my thinking to move away from any number of addictions. I have been in recovery now for many years, but I still cannot find happiness. Oh, there are years of friendship, passion, companionship that become like minutes in my life when looking at the whole picture. Though there is one that on and off again has consumed my world completely, and that loss I struggle with every day of my life. Sadly, it is not my marriage, that recently ended after years of lost reason to stay together.

I write in a cryptic manner because even though this is a private site under a pseudonym, I still worry about my real feelings getting out into the wrong hands and having to face this double reality of my life. In here I am someone I cannot be out there. In here I have been able to speak to people through my words that I cannot out there. I spent a great deal of my energy in this site over the last several years, and have come to terms with the fact it is no longer healthy for me, though the feelings I convey and express are as real as the day is long, and they will never depart my life.

I am lonely, and words are my only bastion when all else has failed. I have trusted people whom have turned their back, and even though I understand why, I cannot help fear her departure from my life. There it is clearly I am speaking of one person. This person has carried my insecurity for many years and her love and affection have allowed me to feel whole. But today as I write this I am splintered, my psyche traveling in a dozen different direction in any given hour, all seeking the same resolve I no longer have in my life.

Speak then of depression. I was diagnosed only a few years ago. I am a person who has walked around for years struggling against labels. I don’t want to be called anti-social. I don’t want to be labeled anything no matter how true it is. But when I sat with a doctor and he stepped out of the room for a moment leaving my chart open and I saw bipolar depression as the number one diagnosis along with adjustment disorder ( a phrase attached to me since I was 17 years old, I finally felt resolve. How many years I had walked around imagining I was actually depressed but had no clinical reference to speak. Now this label I could understand because it was real. I know the doctor did not leave my chart open purposely, because on many occasions it just lay there for anyone’s eyes nearby. I had just never looked. But after being in therapy for so many years, I finally wanted to know if even my doctor believed what I was saying. He was, and that knowledge gave me more freedom than I felt half my life.

Today I have grown to better understand how situational depression affects my overall diagnosis. For the last few years I have been caught up in the unraveling of a very close relationship, not with my spouse, but a very wonderful and compassionate person who holds my heart and soul. She knows my desire to find the green light. It lays across a harbor much like the reference in ‘The Great Gatsby.’ The difference is this metaphor suddenly became very real to me one winter night when I was on a walk from a get together with my wife and some close friends, where I had become so beside myself I had to leave the space and be alone. As I rounded the corner of a ghost town village that bustled in the daylight hours, I trudged through a fresh snow, where my tracks were the only on the street, and for no apparent reason glanced across the harbor. The green light flashed, a very small beacon in the night, small enough to make me believe at first that it was my imagination, but then concentrating I was able to see it is real.

That light is out there tonight. I am close to it, and though I never have been I know exactly how to get to it, and I know clearly the depths and chill of the water that surrounds it. My time would take less than 50 seconds fullY clothed, 10 or 15 of those seconds before the last hope in my mind might allow me to find the surface one last desperate time.

I recently tweeted that I struggle with profound writers of the emotional nature of the human condition, those pieces of writing that seem to resonate with us all in some manner. We end up discovering aha moments in our own lives that evolve from the writer’s words. I think we all choose avenues in our lives and call them fantasy to allow us to when necessary step away. I suddenly can relate better to those writers who then somehow decide to take their own lives, even though their own personal writings always expressed a disbelief in why someone might take such action. I have no illusions of the mastery of words they all discovered on their own, but I do get the motive.

So tonight, I can almost see the green light from the deck of my little vacation home. I am not really near enough for the naked eye, but I know it is there … and if the psyche of the human condition allowed I might be able to look across vast waters and find that light. Instead it would be a drive another twilight evening.

I want this chapter to be my last sometimes in the worst way because I am so tired and alone. I feel pathetic having described it to deaf walls, but I do have value in some aspect of sharing. If you are still with me I am grateful and please amidst the turbulent society we are living in with open wounds, and natural disasters and decades if not centuries of hypocrisy, I extend my hand because I know someone out there, your eyes upon my words, are doing the same for me.

Come visit my new site. I will occasionally submit here, I am just that unable to let go. Though impulse lives in a different world that suddenly jumps.

the ‘b’ series