Perfection

Most alcoholics/addicts have a healthy streak of perfectionism In my case, it was enhanced by survivalism, feeling the need to stay at least one step ahead of the game, and know what’s coming before it gets there. Be ready, all the time. They call it hypervigilance in mental health circles, but it really doesn’t matter what you call it. It’s a coping mechanism that helps you to roll through your days without being caught off guard, stunned into inaction by something you didn’t see coming. You spend your life running from everything, not of your own creation. Spontaneity be damned, you’re a slave to predictability and ultimately, to the illusion of control.

I’ve always been reasonably intuitive, and generally have a good sense about people and their motives. The problem is that I don’t listen to my intuition, and don’t heed the internal alerts because my need to be liked and included outweighs the risk of betrayal. I’ve been burned almost beyond recognition on many occasions while caught in that cycle, but only now do I seem to have some break in the pattern. I walk through the world in the looming shadow of rejection, and I would do almost anything to be free of it.

Life has not always been unkind me. People, on the other hand, have been anyssmal more times than not. Maybe I have been abyssmal to them, although I would have to say arbitrarily, not usually when in direct relationship. No matter, though, because hurt is hurt, trauma is trauma, and hurt people hurt people. We’re all hurt, betrayed by one thing or another, sometimes our own expectations. It is what it is, but now what? What are we going to do with all that hurt?

I was contemplating what happens when dreams die. They don’t die with a shrug of the shoulders and quiet resignation, they die with howls of rage and gunfire, violence, fists to flesh. We are a nation of dying dreams right now, realizing that what we learned to expect is not likely to manifest in many of our human lifetimes. We’re enraged, and heartbroken but we have no effective coping skills for dealing with that primal level of pain. The only tool we can find is the least effective one in the toolbox – cast blame. It’s like having a few drinks to dull an emergent pain, and will do the job only temporarily. The anesthetic will not last, and unless we learn how to find and remedy the root cause of the pain, we’ll become quickly addicted to the anesthetic. Blaming who or what is least likely to be responsible for the pain is our quick fix, and it’s now engrained. It’s also futile.

Lately, when I navigate the world, I feel largely untethered. That feeling has been annoyingly persistent over the past couple of years, but it has now come to a head as I am letting go of childhood things, family mooring, youthful health and resilience. It’s not that I’m no longer resilient, but it’s a slightly more intentional and measured experience as I grow older. I’m living my life alone, aging alone, learning alone but in many ways I have consciously chosen that. Some days I wish I’d made a different choice, but most days I’m content with it. We all make choices about how we live, but often do not realize we feel obligated to live according to expectations that are not ours. If anything disappoints me about the choices I’ve made, it’s usually that I have not met the expectations of others, and that’s not a good feeling.

One of these days I’m going to be able to lay down baggage that is not mine, unpack and discard what is no longer of any use. It’s difficult to let go of much of the old burdens, even though intellectually I understand that it does me no good and is not healthy to retain. There’s some kind of incomprehensible magnetic attraction to a lot of that, however, and I am having trouble breaking those bonds. I realized the other day, though, that memories are the only things I truly own. The rest is relative to my proximity to other entities, financial or physical. Still, I get to choose; I often wonder if I could survive totally off the grid. Food for thought, I suppose.

Perhaps some of my work right now is to dream. I’m not sure I’ve had any real dreams for quite some time, because I have been so busy surviving. For so many years I was a human doing rather than a human being, so maybe it’s time to be. Maybe it’s time to dream, and dreams don’t have to make sense. They can be fantastic and nonsense, so I am going to differentiate between dreams and goals. The gate is closed to goals, only dreams may pass.