RE: My Own Response (Long, sorry) in BookThree: Flight Log 2016

THIS ENTRY is entirely a response to THIS entry. I decided not to “revise” the last entry to put this in because… it seemed like enough to merit its own space. Admittedly, this should be in the explicit folder but… as a response to a non explicit entry; I felt for flow it needed to be here. This is long. A lot of self-reflection and historical analysis. Hopefully, some coming to grips with a few things.

It is probably obvious and should come as no surprise that part of the inspiration behind that last entry is the same old familiar ghosts. The regrets and What Ifs that led me to a “complicated” marriage and a “worrying” occupational standing. Translation: Confusing and not always healthy marriage.... and an unemployed and begging for training occupational standing. That’s all obvious and those specific ghosts will haunt me, quite possibly, until the end of my days.

But… there is more to it. As can be seen in some of the specific references made. I never before had really considered my household to be of particularly religious nature. But as I’ve explored the worlds available and come to understand a world outside of the church… even though, for a long time, we weren’t tied to a specific Church… my upbringing was particularly religious in some ways. I mean… how many people can say their father took them to weekend long seminars on “Being a More Christ-Centered Husband”? What is more significant, I got brought along to those starting at the age of 6! How many people were confronted weekly in their teens about the sinful evils of sexual lust? Oh, it was handled brilliantly because I was always one to see how two opposing things could exist simultaneously. So while I was repeatedly told of the evils of sexual desire; I was encouraged to understand that sexual desire was trying to lead me to my “Chosen Wife” (Chosen by God) and that sating that desire within the bonds of marriage would purify the whole thing. So… sex wasn’t dirty; but sexual urges outside of the marriage bed were evil. So… raised to be a Christ-Centered Husband and repeatedly told my sexual urges were evil until they would be “magically” purified by Marriage.... that says a lot about why, no matter what happens, I’m just… not the kind of guy to walk away from a romantic commitment.

It goes a long way towards explaining how I’m fucked up psychologically about sex and how the whole Aku thing took place, too. Because… Aku was evil in many ways. Seriously. I don’t use that word lightly. But… considering the manipulation, the abuse, the attempted rape, the attempted murder, the assaults, and all of it? She was evil. So , the sexual aspects of that relationship made sense. She’s already evil… she’s perverting the Lust Signals God sends me to help find my wife… giving in to certain lusty desires is okay with her because she’s already evil and perverting the nature of it all. Or some sort of version of that. It also explains why, even after that encounter… I would never again get into those elements of sexuality (for the most part). Besides my wife, Aoife and Aku are the only people I’ve ever engaged in any form of truly sexual interaction… that means just those three women are the only ones with whom I’ve engaged in activities as innocent as breast play and as “not innocent” as fingering and blow jobs. And never sex. Not until Wife. After all, Dad only ever had sex with his wife! Except… of course he did, asshole, they started dating at 16! Even if they banged on their first date; he only would have ever had sex with his wife! Putting the expectations of 1970 Teenage Dad onto 2004 Twenties Son just… isn’t as Copy/Paste as all that.

And that (I think) goes a long way to explaining some of my isolation and loneliness as a kid (which of course explains the self-esteem stuff). I would consider that “Normal” kids were having fun doing dangerous or stupid or wicked things… and “Church” kids would never accept me if they knew just how much evil lurked in my heart! So I threw myself into books. Which didn’t help. The little boy reading during recess doesn’t often get loads of friends. And to this day, I still remember clearly (and regret) my one chance to change all of that. The most popular most Sporty (and some considered, most handsome) boy in school asked me to have lunch at his table and sit next to him. I politely declined. I couldn’t trust that he wanted to be friends or was doing something nice. There had to be an ulterior motive and I wasn’t going to be fooled! Pathetic, in retrospect. And there are lots of times in my life that feel like repeats of that moment. Issues with trust. Trusting the wrong person, not trusting the right person… certainly led to a very rough and rocky social world for 25 years!

Plus… growing up hearing over and over and over “Pursue what you love; the money will come and jobs will change but pursue what you love and you’ll never go wrong.” It sounds corny and like bullshit now… but eating a steady diet of that line for 20 years is what makes a kid accept an Acting Scholarship to a small school in Iowa instead of looking for solid programs in Job-Preparing Fields.

And of course… completely losing 6 months. Don’t know if I’ve discussed this. Probably have. Always good to leave a refresher. My relationship in college with Thompson was fucked in a bunch of ways. I should have known it would be that first summer I was pursuing her when she knew I was going to ask her out, so she spent the entire evening with her ex b/f. One of those game playing, can’t figure her own head out but head games aplenty type of women. I kept up the pursuit… we finally got together… had a messed up relationship without any sexual contact (proving to me that relationships can be fucked without any fucking, lol)… and then at the end… something inside of me broke. It literally broke. I remember thinking that I had just lost “The Woman God Had Chosen For Me”. Yeah.... something inside of me broke. And I handled the break up super shittily. And the few people in my life who gave even the smallest damn spoke up and said I was handling my emotions terribly. And I wasn’t sleeping because whenever I tried, my back/arms/legs would be in so much pain that I physically couldn’t sleep. And I certainly couldn’t walk to school in that much pain. And I lost days of sleep. And weeks of classes. Until it turned into months. Months without sleep and months unable to get to classes… just holed up in my little tower room by myself not even getting visitors. I spent 4 months like that before seeing a doctor. That is when I got the Fibromyalgia diagnosis… and that is why every few years, I go back to a doctor to test that diagnosis. Because… the situation as it was could also have easily produced those symptoms. But all told, I lost 6 months of my life to unstable emotions, constant pain, sleeplessness.... all lost into that little tower room by myself.

And the year after all of those lost months and lost sleep? THAT was 2005. 2005 was the year I had to deal with the Shanon Thing and lost Aoife completely and got together with Wife and realized I could no longer produce the emotional fabrications required for acting… requiring me to give up my scholarship, switch to Religion (as the school did not have a law program) and began studying for LSATs. And since then… I’ve just… been trying. After college, I interviewed at a bunch of businesses to do small things like banking even. But nope… not interested because who is stupid enough to get a religion major?! So, after being a telemarketer for 4 terrible months; I got a full time job as a Best Buy Sales Associate. A 23 year old College Graduate… doing the same job he could have done at 16. I was good at the job but… it certainly wasn’t a career opportunity and I knew I wanted to go to Law School since 2005… just… didn’t want to repeat the mistake I made in college. I wanted to give it a few years to see if I really did want to do the law thing… knowing how much it would cost. And… despite a rather passionless life with my then-Girlfriend… she was loyal, didn’t try to kill me, didn’t try to pressure me into sex, and was far too practical for mind games.... certainly the best girlfriend I’d ever had. So she became Wife and we started Law School… and things have progressed as they have progressed.

It seems simple, almost logical, that everything would progress to this point after seeing it all laid out like that. But I keep hearing I’m better than this… that I’m worth more than this… but everything that has passed certainly seems to lead to here. Perhaps that is why my brother is so successful. He leaped off the path laid before him. He had his “psycho” girlfriend in Junior High… had sex with “the hot girl” in High School… went to the Navy… and then came back to the path laid before him using his artistic abilities. Who knows… I’m probably just talking out of my ass again.