NoleCore

Day 745: With Fear

July 3, 2015 • NoleCore •

Leave not only me
But for every thought I think

I was given the ok from my surgeon to run this week. Ironically enough, the same day I could begin running again was also exactly 5 months of sobriety. Guess it was just meant to be a day of significance. I must say that given how apprehensive I was about having surgery while going through so much emotional turmoil, it lived up to the billing. The past two months were a steep challenge to say the least. Not being very mobile for the first few weeks of it were miserable. I think had I been able to get the natural highs that exercise brings the mind and body, coping with everything may have been made more manageable. The days leading up to surgery I made the hollow point of saying that if I made it through this under these circumstances, I would be stronger off in the long run. That may be true, who knows if things going the way they did will lead to me being ready for something down the line. My generation is notorious for its demand for instant gratification. So I am trying not to get sucked into that and say though I am no longer an invalid hobbling around on crutches, life is still a disaster. Things take time.

There have only been few times in my life where I was truly “terrified”. Fortunately, I haven’t been in combat situations or been face to face with anything capable of killing or maiming me. So I will attempt to talk about this without ever making light of that sort of physical and abrupt terror. The times that I did feel fear were more on a personal level and ended up leaving such deep psychological scars that it remained over a year after the events occurred. Well after my ex wife was gone, I still had physical and emotional triggers that went off when certain situations arose. This was embarrassing, confusing, and scared me. The anxiety that they caused disrupted my life at work and in public. The most vivid example is whenever someone near me made a sudden motion with their hands. I would immediately flinch, noticeably because I would raise my arms as if bracing for being struck by this person. Another trait was my inability to look people in the eye. These are called conditioned fear responses and they are automatic and not under conscious control. They develop over time when we are exposed to fearful situations over and over again. In my case, they developed because of the physical confrontations that I was put in by my ex wife. When I lived with Angelica, she noticed these traits almost immediately. We’d talk all the time so she picked up on me avoiding eye contact. Whenever she tried to tickle me, I’d brace myself as if she was going to punch me. Talking about the events that led to these kinds of reactions did help (I was also seeing a counselor) but what helped me the most was the fact that in the moment when these kinds of things happened or were noticed, we addressed them. If I flinched, she would lightly take my hands and massage them and we’d take some deep breaths together. When I’d be looking at the floor or off to some other corner of the room, she’d gently take the sides of my face and divert my eyes to her own and rub my temples while we continued the conversation. These techniques lessened my fear responses to the point where they happened rarely and I was aware of the changes. The part of the brain that controls these types of responses is called the amygdala, which determines emotional significance and automatic responses are initiated. Rapid reactivity in this part of the brain to stressful situations is a symptom of PTSD. Interestingly enough, the trigger that remains still to this day is the sound of footsteps coming up stairs. No matter how I try to slow things down and process it, my heart rate increases and I still brace my body and clench up, expecting the door to explode open moments after the footsteps stop. The house where Angelica and I lived didn’t have stairs so it never came up. The room I use at my parents house has a staircase leading up to it. The apartment I moved into last month also is on the second floor.

I’m just trying to get better. At least I can run again.

Ásgeir – Heart-Shaped Box

Day 716: Traveling Alone

June 5, 2015 • NoleCore •

You have so therefore you are, but I have not
You are too rich for hate, and I am too poor to love.

When events in your life cause you to feel like you are being torn down, its hard to shake off the isolation mentality. Being in public helps a lot, even if there isn’t any real interaction between yourself and the strangers around you. Sitting alone is better when its among others. Sometimes I see people I know or used to know and they say hello and that kind of gets the ball rolling with conversation and human contact. Friends across time zones helps stretch communication across the hours. I always have a book nearby.

People seem surprised by the journeys I have taken by myself. I feel like sometimes having another soul to enjoy the view with could be an enhancing quality, although I have seen plenty of breath taking landscapes with only silence to share it with. It forces you to process it in a way that will last a lot longer. There will be no one else to back up your claim of a memory, so you have to take it all in and be able to relay it, whether it be to yourself at a later date or to a friend that wishes to hear where you have been. Going to Europe and the empty spaces across North America several times alone turned me into quite a story teller. I try and take a few photos that accurately depict where I am, but its the lost art of spoken recollection that I think is the true way to relay to one another.

Faith is a way that I think people have found a way to never truly be traveling alone. Their gods are their cloak of comfort against the biting cold of solitude and reality. The universe constantly reminds us of its presence and its working motions. I see evidence of your gods all around me. I’m just not sure they are listening. Perhaps it is a one way communication only. The universe speaks.

I try to be thankful to be alive.

Alcest – Autre Temps

Day 710: The Wasteland

May 30, 2015 • NoleCore •

There are no clocks to measure time
But the beating of our single hearts

The most wasted emotion that has ever poured forth from my mind, mouth, and acted upon by my limbs is frustration. I think I have encountered it on a weekly, sometimes daily basis for as long as I can remember. I can dutifully report back that it was a smashing success at accomplishing : nothing. Not a damn thing. Yet there it is, waiting to burst out and make me grit my teeth. Big things. Little things. Treacherous things. Things of utter betrayal. Things of devastating sadness. All frustration did was end. It annihilated. Whatever it was that summoned it would be rendered second hand once the bestial tentacles of frustration exploded into the conversation. My point is, that getting frustrated stops being effective once its no longer directed at a mischievous teenager who didn’t do their homework or snuck out at night. With adults, with real life problems, its just going to rehash something awful or angry and delay any sort of healing process. So actually, if you want to keep doing this dance of doom involving frustration, lets just save time and money and just go ahead and throw down the gauntlet and walk out of the room. No fighting yelling or accusing. This is just over.

Sounds a bit dramatic, doesn’t it? But I cannot even count all the times we ended nights in tears or glares while being “frustrated”. We’re human. Not everyone has the immaculate patience to count to 10 or some other hypnotic cease fire to end all conflict. However, there does need to be a moment of clarity where you can say out loud, “is frustration towards my partner taking this somewhere it doesn’t need to venture”….because if it does, hold on for dear life and leave a note in case you two don’t make it back alive.

I walked away from my marriage out of frustration. Should have I? I think the real question should have been asked years prior, and worded differently. Before the abuse. Before the affair. Had I approached things that I wasn’t understanding with open arms and an open mind, perhaps things may not have progressed to shattered glass. I know I wasted so many precious precious moments going away from the roots of problems because of my frustrations. I had the intelligence to try a new approach. I definitely had the love to want to help instead of chastise and criticize. But what stopped me from helping things have a chance in hell was the snake pit before the solution. The frustration. “How could you steal the money?”, “Why are you out all night with strangers and who keeps texting?”…. did I have a right to know? Of course. Was a sober moment on a sunny morning a better setting than a dark, substance altering moment during the wee hours of the night? Absolutely. But that frustration…wasn’t going to let ME put my head down and wait until morning. No, I wanted it then and there, laid out with the screaming the crying and the threats. The police needed to come.

When you’re the sober one in these situations, I think people on the outside look at you like you must be strong and just at the breaking point. I always just felt really confused. How and why the hell am I doing this and why is my family seeming so broken all of the time? It broke because we thought we could just beat all of the demons because we loved one another. We were wrong. The human heart is a fragile thing and it will jump and flip right out of your hands the moment it thinks something it just cannot tolerate has occurred. I’m not saying we can save every relationship that is on the rocks. But I will say this : if you stay calm and figure out both sides of the stories no matter how gruesome it gets, each person will be ALWAYS better off than if frustration consumes you and becomes one of its deadlier growths, such as wrath and revenge. I was put to this test recently and while it may not have worked out as I had hoped, and yes my heart had that sad familiar feeling of loss come back to it, I didn’t get frustrated for once. I heard the other persons frantic goodbyes, and was able to respond with a dignified one of my own. One that I never would have given honor to had I became frustrated. I walk away towards my new life with my dignity intact, my head held high, and the knowledge that it is me who controls my “I love you”‘s and final goodbyes, not frustration and anger.

Day 697: Mother’s Earth

May 12, 2015 • NoleCore •

…Confusion broken hearted woe

7 years ago I was sitting in Slave to the Needle, a tattoo shop in Seattle, right down the street from my studio apartment. It was Mother’s Day. I think I was the only male customer, everyone else seemed to be part of a mother – daughter combination getting matching tattoos that day. I had been in for a few appointments before this one, my best work at the time was all done by this shop, and I had been planning to come here today for quite some time. I’m big into symbolism and dates. I just have always believed that if something is of a heightened significance to you, make it stand out. This was the first Mother’s Day since the birth of my daughter. She would be thousands of miles away in Florida with her mother, spending a family holiday that would not be including myself. The tattoo I was getting on my wrist was “Mourn”.

I distinctly remember having a conversation with my mother at a cafe down near the Brooks Bridge in Fort Walton Beach right after Cali was born. The fallout with her mother was still something I was trying to process, and I had just found out she was seeing someone else. The line I can remember saying was “I’m going to end up one of those broken burned out guys sitting alone in a bar at age 45 with a million “what ifs” on his mind.

This started off a chain of very empty holidays whenever I was not with my child. I don’t know how other single parents handle those first few years of spending Christmas’, birthdays, and other special days away from their little one. There is nothing that prepares you for those, at least not to my knowledge. I really wish I had reached outward to my family members, but instead I was very introverted in my grief and anger. I totally skipped those holidays without Cali, refusing to even acknowledge them at all. The people that cared about me the most were the ones that felt the wrath of my self imposed isolation. Meanwhile my baby was happy and taking in the love of her mothers side of the family. I should have been thankful for that, she could have been in a much more grim situation.

This past Mother’s Day was just as bittersweet as those other doomed holidays, if not more. I am going to look at it as proof that this journey is incomplete, that if I want to truly keep growing as a person and get better, then I need to handle these situations with far more grace and acceptance than years past. There is no point in making myself miserable. This is a self destructive activity totally in line with what my alcoholism was. I think that there will be several more bumps in the road similar to what just happened. Its up to me to recognize them as being detrimental and how I did things in the past, and change how I handle them so that I can get better. Just because I don’t drink anymore, doesn’t mean that I still don’t think like an alcoholic. The mind is something that takes time to rework, and has to be approached with much more caution and care. If I ever want to have the privilege and joy of having a Mother’s Day with someone who has made the decision to spend our lives together, then this is the work I have to do before that can ever happen.

No one ever asked me about that tattoo until I met Angelica. I think it was the first one she ever noticed. She has a tattoo, in the exact same location, with the exact same red to black colors. Hers says “Father” and has almost the same story as mine.

Day 692: Grace

May 7, 2015 • NoleCore •

Read the story of my skin
Tell me more about the man I should have been
I’ll be the martyr…Falling from his grace again

5 years today since that first date. I am going to open up to you about something I have never told anyone. The person Samantha cheated on me with was the drummer in an old metal band called Prong. His name is Alexei Rodriguez. I think he is 42 years old now. We went to see them open up for Clutch in Pensacola. Then I took her on a work trip with me to Savannah Georgia and they were opening up for COC while we were there. I saw her stop him after their set and give him a hug. I didn’t think anything of it, I am a very trusting person. Or at least I was back then.

The next month I happened to see her phone screen while we were watching TV, I was leaning my head on her shoulder. I never looked at her phone. Ever. But seeing the name alexei was strange because I had never heard of this person and the content of the text that popped up was confusing. She told me it was a girl she had known before she met me that liked the same music as me. I believed her for about 3 months that this was a girl. Then one day at Starbucks she left her phone on the table and it went off. Again, strange text message and this time it was kind of sexual. I scrolled through the messages and sure enough it was definitely not a girl and they were talking about sex and how attractive she thought he was. She was also telling him music related stories that either happened to me in real life, or that I had told her. I still didn’t know how she knew this person though. I went on Facebook and figured it out by looking at the comments written on random posts and photos and then googling the name. I think you know the rest of what happened, we separated after she threw a drink on my face at AJs then beat the hell out of me when we got home and destroyed my office. The police were called, saw all the marks on me, and suggested I go stay at my mothers.

We decided that I would stay at my moms while she looked for a place to stay. We never once said we were getting a divorce, after that first week or so of being really emotional and upset. One day, Samm suggested to me that I go out of town to take some time for myself and to let things calm down. I told her that sounded like a good idea and the very next day, my friend Matt and I drove from Santa Rosa Beach to Alaska. We were gone 10 days. While I was gone, Samantha took the money my father had given her to live on while we separated, and bought a plane ticket for Alexei. He came down to Florida and stayed with her the entire time. She even got him a job where she was working at the Elephant Walk out in San Destin. I found all of this out after the Dax Rigg show when I saw her phone. I found out that she had paid for it and had this all planned out before we even separated by looking at her school email months later when she asked me to help her register for classes.

We were only apart two months at the time of the Dax Riggs show but when she got pilled out and was totally unconscious afterwards I saw her phone and looked at the texts. And the photos. I called the phone number, got the voice mail and demanded he stay away from my wife and that we were still married. And then he started texting me graphic details about how he had sex with my wife, and how much of an awful parent I was. This went on for months. All the while I saw Samantha almost every day and tried to do what I could to convince her to come home and stop this relationship with Alexei. I still helped her out financially. I paid her rent almost every month that she was at this other house. It was off Main Street in Destin and I still get a bad feeling when I drive past it. It got to the point where she didn’t even really even hide her communication with him right in front of my face. Texts were coming in constantly when she was with Cali and I. They were always the same stupid pointless conversations. It was like she dumbed herself down just to speak to this idiot. This consumed my life. I was constantly trying to see what was really going on. I can’t even imagine how much money and time I threw down the drain living like this. Most nights going to sleep alone in an empty house while she was going out after work and having an open relationship with another man. When I eventually met all her coworkers, I could tell they were pretty confused to see me and see how I still treated her with respect and love.

This went on until the middle of July, when I found out she was flying up to North Carolina to see him. I begged her not to go. Cried at her feet. She still took the rental car I had (she had totaled the new car that I bought her back on July 4th), and drove to New Orleans to get on a plane. She had some sort of final fear of throwing her marriage away, and when she got to North Carolina, called me crying. I got her a hotel and a flight home the next morning. She promised to never speak to him again and that this was over. Of course this was a lie. The texts from him came, taunting me with all of this, and ridiculing her. Pretty much saying what an awful girl she was and that he didn’t want her anyway. Meanwhile they started emailing each other again about a week later. She caught me looking at her phone reading an email, and beat me worse than ever before. Our entire master bedroom was destroyed. I bought her a brand new car the next day.

We got pregnant the next month before we went to Estonia. She knew I wanted a baby and said later it was the only way she thought she could get me to stay with her after everything that had happened. While we were in Tallinn, she started using Skype to contact Alexei. She was on a different flight home than me because I was staying longer to work at a coffee shop in Estonia for a few weeks. She forgot to log out of Skype on my laptop, so it showed their entire conversation as it happened in real time while she was in the airport. She hadn’t even gotten onto the plane before she was saying that she was in Europe with a friend and that she wanted to see him as soon as she got back home. I told her it was over when she got to the next airport, and of course she told me that since she was pregnant she would come after me. I flew home the next day and of course got texts from Alexei throwing everything in my face, including laughing about the thought that the baby was his.

We had a miscarriage on my birthday two months later. A week later, I found all of the old emails that proved she was having an affair this entire time, over a year ago and only a few months after we had our wedding and bought our brand new house. They were sexual and inappropriate from the very first day. And were constant the entire time, almost every single day. On my birthday, on Christmas while we were in California visiting family, on Valentines Day…nothing was sacred. The week after I found all of this out, she was diagnosed with cancer.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

She started the affair all over again when we got back from Iceland. She had relapsed, stolen money from me for pills before we left, and then spent a chunk of our time in Iceland going through awful withdrawals or totally drunk off vodka. I came home from work the first day back and picked up the iPad to look at photos, and of course their entire Skype conversation was on the screen. When I refused to say that I would give her another chance, she destroyed every single memento we had from our wedding. Everything. Finally, she picked up the poster that Cali and I made her using hundreds of photos of us as a family, shaped into a heart. I told her that if she destroyed that, I would call the police. The cops had been to our house 3 times prior for domestic violence calls. All 3 times they made me leave, even though she was the one who had hit me. So she got to spend the night in jail this time. I bailed her out the next day.

On August 17th, she got on a one way flight and left for good. I wish that was the end of it, but 9 confusing, convoluted months followed. Whether it was concerns for her health, my out of control drinking, or the painful shame of failing in a marriage, the end was hard to come about. It finally came to an end 2 months after I finally got sober. Almost 5 years exactly. I have tried to completely erase it from my everyday life. I want no reminder at all about any of this. I switched gyms since we met at golds, got tattoo cover ups, erased everything I possibly could.

Samantha, I forgive you. Alexei, I also forgive you as well. I don’t feel sorry for either of you. I just forgive you. Hating you would mean carrying a part of you and the memories with me, and I want neither. Forgiveness has led to total annihilation of something that ruined me for a very long time. A fresh start would not be possible without this, and I learned that the hard way. Every life lesson and period of growth was not inspired by you at all. It was just a matter of survival. I wish no ill will towards what remains of your life, just that it doesn’t ever cross paths with my own.

Day 689: The Alcoholic

May 2, 2015 • NoleCore •

The best thing about recovery is getting your feelings back. The worst thing about recovery is getting your feelings back.

Recovering from an addiction has been a path traversing both into reality and the landscape of mind and emotion. There is the side of it steeped in human biology, chemical reactions, and scientific facts. I really wish I had knowledge of all of these things when I made the choice to get sober. It would have made me use a hint of caution, especially around my loved ones and my job, and given me hope and a peace of mind when things spiraled out of control on some days. The other side of the path of sobriety is how you approach it mentally and the strength of what you are made of as you try and weather the storm. There is a reason recovery groups list milestones to strive for while attempting to regain control of your life. Any victory, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, is a foothold to grab onto in what is a very, very chaotic and difficult journey.

Today is 92 days sober for me. Damage that years of alcohol abuse caused to the frontal lobe of my brain should be close to healed by now.

“it takes about 90 days for the brain to break free of the immediate effects of the drug and reset itself. Researchers at Yale University call this 90-to-100 day period the “sleeper effect,” a time during which the brain’s proper analytical and decision-making functions gradually recover.”

My memory of incidents that have happened both recently and years ago definitely seem clearer in my mind. Which is a painful reminder of just how stupid and self destructive I have been acting over the last decade of my life. There are also frustrating moments when I cannot even fathom how I could have possibly been so SELFISH. I mishandled so many confrontations when as a sober person, I could have walked away or soothed the burning emotions. Being an alcoholic caused me to care very little about not only my loved ones, but about any consequences at all. I definitely cared about myself and what I wanted, hence why I called myself “selfish”. But as far as the health, financial, and emotional consequences, I really didn’t care.

A really fitting encounter happened yesterday. As I was driving through a parking lot in Fort Walton Beach, I saw a man walking with his young daughter. He was easily recognizable. I had gotten into a big bar fight with him several years ago at a dive bar called Coasters. That period of my life was one of the most reckless, and when my drinking picked up considerably. I was all alone in Seattle, reeling from the fallout with my daughters mother. Not being an everyday parent drove me crazy, and knowing another man was raising my child every day while she was still an infant and me being able bodied and willing, caused me to not give a damn about very much. It is a miracle I stayed in graduate school or wasn’t thrown in jail this time of my life. The week prior to coming home to Florida and getting in the brawl, I had driven to Alaska from Seattle, a sort of psycho holiday… in the middle of December. In my Jetta. It was such an idiotic, foolish, and reckless “plan”, that I casually left a farewell letter sitting on my desk in the event that I died during the voyage. I still have the letter somewhere. When I somehow made it halfway to Anchorage without being crushed by a rampaging buffalo (a near miss) or flung off a cliff during white out snow fall conditions, I tempted fate by drinking a few beers at some backwater outpost in a ghost town. After driving all the way to Anchorage and back to Seattle in about 5 days, I arrived in Florida and was “allowed” to see my daughter for a few hours in Tallahassee. When I got to Fort Walton Beach, I went straight to the bar and proceeded to get hammered. Lack of sleep and lack of care resulted in me staggering around the corner and proclaiming to the first person that I saw that they had a beat down coming. There is really no point in recounting the details. They disgust me. I still have the scar above my eye from the punches I took to my face. My knuckles were sliced to ribbons, and I was told that I was laughing like an idiot as I got pummeled by this guy and one other person. A friend saved me from further injury by threatening to call the police, and I remember sitting in his car afterwards. I burst into tears, not from any physical pain, but out of the frustrating feeling that I was on some runaway train that I had no idea how to stop. I got out of the car, found the person who I had fought sitting under a staircase behind the bar covered in my blood, and apologized to him. I distinctly remember telling him thank you and that I had deserved this. I wasn’t just referring to my actions that night, either.

Last week my dad and I were having lunch on the bayou, and he told me a side of my late grandfather that I had never heard before. I was shocked. Never in a million years would I have ever pictured my grandfather being an alcoholic. Not from my memories of him. He was a sweet, hilarious old man that never had a frown on his face right up until the day he left this earth. Yet here I was, listening to an eerily similar story of alcohol abuse, violent and reckless tendencies, and a brush with throwing a family away. I couldn’t believe it. It was how he finally changed that made me realize that this journey I am on is guided by fate of family and circumstances. He quit cold turkey, same as I had done almost 3 months prior, because he couldn’t live with how he was hurting his family. Maybe this addiction skipped a generation. Would I have approached alcohol in a different mind set had I known my families complete history? I have no idea. Sometimes I think we just have to experience these kinds of things for ourselves. That being said, I wish I had at least known that this had happened before in my lineage. This entire time I had been walking around thinking that my family tree held no history of addiction.

I know that this isn’t over yet. Meetings with a drug and alcohol counselor has helped my awareness of the chemical side of things and how the cycle of post-acute withdrawal symptoms will be a part of my life for the next several years of my life. These happen every 30 days or so, another piece of information I would have been better off knowing before this all started…my last fight with Angelica happened around day 60. The details of these symptoms and what happened that weekend are uncanny.

Like I wrote last week, both with the fact that I am sober and the other changes that I have made in my life have resulted in a fact that I am oh so aware of : I am better off now than I have ever been in my entire life. I will never forget the pain I caused the people that I love the most, or underestimate the damaging power of substance abuse.

My inspiration

Anders Osborne – Mind Of A Junkie

Newer
1
…
5
6
7
8
9
…
21
Older

Instagram