Identity Crisis in Life

That’s my middle name. Adam ‘Identity Crisis’ Daniel (Yes, that is my real-boring-ass-name, Google away.

Well. If around the time of the last entry you’d had told me that I’d be locked indoors slowly going crazy I wouldn’t have believed you. I’m of the camp of “this is just a bad flu, wash your damn hands” and while I still believe that, I have some serious questions for those of you are spreading it. Like seriously. What the hell are you doing to spread this?

But I’m just a fellow with no authority or education to have any sort of merit in discussing that, so lets move on to something that I’m really well versed in!

Not knowing who the fuck I am.

While this is something that we all know I’ve been dealing with since (before) coming to Ottawa, it really peaked last week and I found that I was loosing myself in this new world. I was no longer Adam, I was Father of Elly or Husband of Pam. I was beginning to feel like I exsisted to serve others. And that’s somethign that Iv’e struggled with before, before I was staying home doing nothing BUT serving others.

While I’m the “Doer” of the family that’s usually balanced out with the therapeautic nature of my work, but that was snatched away from me which is a whole ‘nother issue.

But beyond that, After a really bad week and probably one of the worst depressive spirals I’ve seen in a while I started to look at the bigger picture of it all. And expressing my favourite retorspective.

They say that every 5 years (or so) you go through an immense amount of chaos and that the 5 years you’re not in chaos, you’re ‘traveling’ or learning from the chaos you had went through, to better prepare yourself for the next round. And I believe this whole thing is about to kick of my next 5 years of Chaos (as I turned 36 last month, even thought it feels yesterday -BECAUSE EVERY DAY IS THE SAME -) but there’s a lot I really haven’t had the chance to un-pack emotionally since the Rebecca Chronicles.

And in looking back, I’m not sure that, that’s really a good title for those chapters of my life. Because it wasn’t about her, it wasn’t even about me.

At some point in my career and my life there was a moment that really made me define who I was or wanted to be. There was a server looking at the schedule and she said something like “Oh good! Mike is working, that means it’s gonna be a good shift”

And I remember thinking, I want people to see my name and think that. And I really lost that perspective at some point as my own point of view became muddied by the ambition of others. And that’s not to blame those people, it’s an admittance that I allowed my vision to get muddied.

During my most recent downward spiral I really started to believe that a lot of the people I surround myself with, don’t actually want to surround themselves with me, they merely put up with me and allow me to take part in whatever they’re getting up to. Even as I type this there’s a motivation bubbling within me (or is it all that cauliflower I ate earlier?) that I wish I could bottle and put up on a shelf for those days where I just don’t have the get-up-and-go.

It was while I was starting to push people away that I started to look back on when Rebecca broke up with me. She really didn’t /want/ to at all, but it was clear that she was romantically done with the whole engagement (not event engagment, just the word, calm down) and looking back on it now, I was very clear that when we split, I was done with the whole relationship, not just the romantic version of it and it hurts so much more now because I think she may have been genuinely the first person who cared about me as Adam. Not as a boyfriend, not as a cook, not as anything more, or less, than a person. And it /sucks/ that I fucked that up so bad. Mind you it also sucks that it took me 5 years+ to figure that out and that, realistically, there’s no turning back. Like I want to write a letter to her that I’d never send y’know?

To Whom it May Concern,

Whoops! I fucked up!
-Adam.