Another Wednesday Morning

-Wednesday morning. Another Wednesday morning. Aw hell… I’m afraid to write. I mean, seriously. I’m actually afraid to write. I’m such a fraud. Why am I like this? Why am I at all?

Travis said, as if he was speaking to the dog. Olive was his strength, though ironically she too was traumatized, and he loved her so much because she was perhaps the only thing as fragile as him.

-Stop that! What are you doing?

Travis patted his lap and the shaggy gray dog with the big, sad, soulful eyes walked from the mattress of the bed straight to him, sitting in his writing chair at the desk. Olive took a seat and looked up at him. He stared into her eyes, wrapped his arms around her and said, “please give me the strength to get through the day.”

-Sure. That happened, but I didn’t really want to announce it.

Travis, aren’t writers supposed to bear their souls? That is a powerful moment. I mean, you are so depressed that you literally asked your tiny dog who herself is scared to leave the house in February after fireworks on New Years Eve, for the strength to get through the day. That means something. People feel that, like you do.

-I get it. I also want the universe to drop a small meteor on my head so this can all stop. Is that what people want to see? You think people want to learn about what a loser I am? The way I’m a useless drunk who hurt everyone around me and burned my life to the ground? That I break everything that I touch. Great! Why don’t you talk about how I’m living in my parents’ guest room at almost 50? Just what people want to soak in on a sunny afternoon.

Well, you say that you want to be a writer. That isn’t all “God is a floating eye that tries to erase traumas from people’s lives, so they won’t break the world because they have some spin on David Haller’s powers.” It’s about showing yourself within your work.

Don’t you want to own your life? You tell other people that recovery is courageous all the time, don’t you believe what you say? “Every day is a new chance to start over and evolve.” Is that all just crap to you, or are you so terrible that it doesn’t apply to you alone? I’m not sure you’re equipped to be a writer if your life can’t openly handle even a basic examination.

-I am very exposed… at arm’s length. Michelle’s relationship with her father, the speech at Al-Anon that I wrote her was exactly my speech to the Al-Anon room, I think it was the second or third time I went. Same speech, just mom instead of dad. Elliott’s battle with fear and his crushing inner voice, that’s me. That’s exposed. I just used a character to filter it through. Isn’t that what everyone does?

It’s only half honest that way because you believe in salvation for him, but not for you. Those stories are nothing more than self-help propaganda coming out of you because at the end of the day, you don’t feel like you deserve the peace you gave Elliott and Michelle. Look, let me do my thing. Sit back, have a beer… oh. Whoopsie-daisy. Have a… coffee? Sorry that you’re a drunk in recovery.

-See, you did that one on purpose. You knew exactly what you were doing there.

Again, you can think it, but I don’t get to write it? Feels kind of hypocritical to me. Go get some water and let me work. You can complain all you want when you’re back and have seen what I’m starting here. I need space to work.

Now… Where was I? Oh yes.

Travis was indeed lost. He had burned his marriage down. The sap was so broken in his relationship with intimacy, and so lost in denial of his alcoholism that he got wasted and went to a strip club while his wife was recovering from surgery in the hospital. He got sober and regretted a lot from his life, but he wasn’t going to get to the bottom of the fact that as a survivor of sexual trauma, intimacy of both the physical and emotional variety frightened him.

He was also in big trouble at his job. Travis had been so depressed for so long that issues kept piling up that he was too overwhelmed to deal with and they just grew and grew as he stared out the window in constant anxiety. Travis wanted to be a writer, but he was scared there too. He felt like a fraud, and maybe he was right. He couldn’t properly tell his own story, so what right did he have to tell ones outside of him?

His proverbial boat had so many more holes than he had fingers to plug them. It paralyzed him and all he was capable of doing was wallowing. He was living out of a gas station quick mart, smoking so excessively. He wanted to die, and it was just so…

-OK. Come on. That's just cruel. Why? Why is any of that necessary? It just feels like you’re resentful of me falling apart and beating me up for no literary reason that I can see.

…pathetic. Travis. Again: cruel or true? I’m just summarizing what goes on in your mind every day. Stop interrupting me. I can make things difficult for you.

-What's that supposed to mean?

Do you want to have a third arm coming out of your chest? I mean, how would shirts even work, particularly if it was like a T. Rex arm. So short that it would really serve no purpose while you wore a shirt. You hate being shirtless. I know how self-conscious that makes you.

-Don’t you dare!

Travis rolled over in bed to the horrifying shock that he grew a third arm out of his solar plexus. It was short, and didn’t seem to have much utility. Too short to eat with. Placed poorly to use for writing. He supposed that maybe he could drive with it and have his other hands free, but to what end? Using your cell phone while driving was still distracting.

-Holy crap! It really grew on me. Why? How? Please write it out.

No, no. I don’t think I will. I’m trying to do something here and these interruptions, your lack of faith and trust is making it very difficult.

Also, as he wandered towards the kitchen a clown exited the adjacent bedroom.

“Hey Travis! Scoobily-Scribbledy scat-scat dooo!” The clown said. This was the way the clown greeted Travis every time they crossed paths, and they crossed paths often.

-Wait! OK. You win. I’ll be quiet.

Are you sure? I have plenty of ideas and you’ve been very indulgent, bullying yourself relentlessly. It’s quite tiresome and I’m really not in the mood.

-Look! What right… siiiiighhhhhhh… Yeah. I get it. I’ll listen.

Alright. Thank you.

Travis did a lot of damage to others, and a lot of damage to himself, and now he sits back feeling sorry for himself with his ideations. He just wants to escape and not feel it. He doesn’t want to grow. He just hates himself and wishes for the end, and his whining is incredibly frustrating.

Maybe we can finally do something about it.

It was another Wednesday morning when Travis arrived at the treatment center for the first time, scared and curious. He would sit in groups for 36 hours a week, opening up his life fully to strangers. What if he was too broken? What if he wasn't broken enough? What if they found him tiresome and stupid?

His depression had become so severe that the state, based on the recommendation of his doctor, gave him a disability leave to try to deal with it. This was good because if I’m being honest, Travis could no longer function. He couldn’t get out of bed, at least not without a great deal of shaming himself. This perhaps motivated him, but it only cycled him deeper into his hole.

He had been sober for almost seven months, but he still had no feet under him. It isn’t easy watching your marriage crumble, and then deciding to leave it because you don’t believe that you can change properly within it. It isn’t easy seeing yourself having burned a job that you spent a quarter century building, now only being kept around for pity, not utility. These events, and a realization that he didn’t even know who he was anymore were a freefall.

-Can I just express some concern? This is a lot of honesty and I’m really uncomfortable.

It’s OK. Just sit back. You’ll be alright.

Travis gave into his sadness and futility, knowing that there was no other way that he could ever have a life. There were times when he was so ashamed, so locked in self-hatred that he couldn’t find a point, but he wanted what other people were finding, and he loved the people in his groups. He wanted to be a good citizen of the room, and he wanted them to succeed so badly that he was able to keep the efforts up for them on days when he didn’t care enough about himself to find the energy. He wanted to be the one to fetch the tissue box and hand it to someone when they cried. He loved them not only because they were great people, but also because he felt the pain they carried. It was very much like his own.

This made him a man who felt hopeless, but for the sake of others one who didn’t want to live like someone who had given up. How could he be good to anyone if he lived that way?

One day, a clinician passed out a packet for “Shame” and talked about internal fallacies. She asked the room to externalize their shame onto others that they loved and see if the punishing bludgeoning tools that they targeted on themselves so freely would feel warranted on another. It didn’t even have to be a loved one, “what about a stranger?”

Travis believed that he should never have been born. He blamed himself for it. Travis believed that he had no right to be angry, even when he was wronged. This was just a reason to be angry at himself because anger was nothing but poison and he should be better. He looked around the room and tried these thoughts on other people and then he cried a deep, visceral cry.

“I’ve lived with these feelings for almost fifty years. I’ve wasted my life. I’ve wasted everything.”

He continued crying. Then a friend sitting next to him passed him a tissue box. It had worked its way around the room from an end table on the other side, hand to hand by about half the room to make it to him. Seeing it in front of him made him cry more, but differently. It was beautiful. The effort had been beautiful. His neighbor smiled warmly and put his hand on Travis’ shoulder. The rest of his cohort smiled warmly too. His friend crossed the room to sit next to him and put her hand on his other shoulder. He was not alone, and they loved him too.

The clinician spoke. “It’s true that you have lived in a painful way for a very long time, but how do you want to spend the rest of your life? You’ve made mistakes, including this one, but you have also done a lot of good too. You are not a bad person. Don’t you want the time you have left, hopefully quite a bit still, to be spent better?”

This afternoon and this conversation didn’t fix Travis, but it started a shift. It was him tying his hiking boots and starting his ascent up the hill to a view that before that day he couldn’t have possibly imagined, certainly didn’t think he deserved to see. This was the beginning of his forgiveness.