Spouse. Family. Friends that are family. Health. Black metal. Weed.

This is what 6 years of recovery and PTSD therapy have taught me are important to me. No compromise. One of the periodic assessments I do asks about changing priorities and I always thought it stupid. I mean, of course they’ve changed, I don’t want to look at the world through the depressing distance of my drug-bedazzled whiskey telescope anymore. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? They already have changed.

But it wasn’t my opinion of my poor coping strategies they were after.

I told my youngest son this morning that if you’re always chasing perfect you’ll never be happy because perfect doesn’t exist.

What the fuck is wrong with me? I can spontaneously distill and disseminate the obvious when confronted with the minor imperfection of a sticker on a newly-built lego set but I can’t apply this knowledge to myself in any way?

The fuck that’s wrong with me is rooted in the death of my mother at a young age and my subsequent upbringing by a narcissist (every mistake or undesireable action on my part was for the sole purpose of hurting my already hurt father and making my angry step-mother angrier. For “kicks” I guess, I dunno. It was confusing since I tried to hide myself and never get caught but it was the ‘tough love’ dog-whistle satanic-panic 80s so there never was sense). In other words, the fuck that’s wrong with me is a complete lack of self-compassion, self-confidence and self-worth based on constant subservient usefulness and perfection being pivotal to making people care about me and keeping those people I need most from hating me or leaving me. Whew.

My “rebellious phase” became goal-oriented, caring about something future-y that was more than just my own self-indulgence and that fit my intelligent but otherwise unruly nature while still offering financial autonomy and job security. Enter the world of 911. Paradoxically as a spiritually-fatigued and apathetic teenager I became quite interested in this “world outside of the world” where people lived and worked to the beat of a different drum to help society in the layer beneath the superficial where most existed. So much about me made entering this world make sense. In a uniform it was only my capabilities that mattered. I had found a place.

This role made the above list of importance back then so obviously there’s been no compromise for that either. But compromise I must now, and it’s not me the person being compromised anymore. My spirit is stained with far more than just the waning youthful exuberance behind my burning desire to prove all others wrong about me; in the process, for good or bad, I proved myself wrong many times over, too. I’m fucking scared but it’s no excuse. This show called life must go on somehow.

Until next time, stay recovered!