Two months ago my father died.
One month ago I woke-up from almost 39 years of living in a fog after giving up most of my compulsive behaviors. It was rough at times.
I loved the escape, getting out of my mind on drink and food, passive aggressive blaming, addictive relationships and a lack of authenticity and integrity. The first day was fine, the second day was tough, day 3 to 10 were a challenging detox, then things began to improve.
I never thought about starting any of it again though. I effectively stopped sleeping and was only able to get about 3-5 hours a night of cold sweating and dread. I took to sleeping with Bear again, a stuffed animal that Rachel gave me a number of years ago because I felt so alone when my eyes would pop open after 30 minutes or 30 seconds of sleep. It didn’t feel weird to take him out of the closet and cuddle him. He has personality and that seemed to give me strength.
At some point I noticed that a lot of the suffering had started to go away. I was left with some intrusive thoughts, but my therapist coached me on some cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that have been extremely effective at transforming the thoughts into something else. With the proper context, I can see that something happened and am free to tell myself any story and create any feeling about it that I like. She’s very good at her job and has spared me a lot of pain, replacing it with a contentment for the average life I have lived surrounded by some extraordinary people.
I made peace with everything upon seeing the motivation of my actions, accept it, and became extremely grateful for all of my experiences.
Then, seemingly out of nowhere, love began to flow. This is a powerful love that I haven’t experienced as an adult. It is more powerful than anything that I imagined I was capable of experiencing. It is hard to articulate it, but it feels like a highly focused understanding and compassion for humanity, all things living and everything in existence. A metaphysical understanding that I am the universe, that all of us are made up of pieces of the universe that have existed since everything began. Our form borrows bits and pieces as slightly more organized but utterly meaningless collections of matter. We exist as this for an insignificant amount of time and then we are returned back into the cosmos.
My spirit is restored when I realize what this means. We are all exactly the same thing, I am no different, not even different from other people. The fog is gone, and it is impossible to forget the experience of what it is like.
I can feel emotions, sense their origin, and fearlessly attack the world. I understand my essence and that my spirit is pure. I am now incapable of lying to myself or to others. I see my compulsive past as a gift, and the remainder of my life will be about fulfilling my purpose. My vitality peaks as the energy of the universe channels through my body – I have become indestructible because I have died.
Patrick doesn’t exist anymore, he never did. He was a figment of an imagination and a desire to be instead of being. People think I have lost my mind, and I have.