Never Alone

There is no person that can live a life without feeling loss or pain.  We experience these on different levels, but non of us are exempt from enduring the sadness they induce.  No one person deals with the sadness and hurt in the same way.  Some never face it.  They go on living the distractions, keeping just occupied enough to never sit down face to face with their own self.  Some become the sadness.  They allow it to be their universal excuse, their reason for being, their identity of self.  Some retreat into a dark hole.  They never admit or deny, they withdraw from everything, from every feeling, every opportunity for growth or self discovery.  They don't care, they don't love, they don't live.  Then, their are the people who use the sadness as a ladder to self discovery.  They sit with their experience.  They acknowledge it, ask it questions, search for the answers and slowly make a complete recovery, one step closer to awareness.  Of course, their are people who fit none of these, but most people are a mixture of all four.

There are moments in my life in which I have used each of these methods for dealing with my sadness.  Most of the time, I switch back and forth between them all so fast that I start to feel schizophrenic.  After I went home for Christmas that year in France, I could no longer live in my stage of not facing the truth.  The truth literally hit me in the face.  The reason behind my constant state of anxiety, fear and doubt followed by my defense mechanism of flight was finally starting to reveal itself.  What I had been fleeing from for so many years was the hardest thing for a person to get away from.  Their background, the thing that set the stage for their first definition of self, their family.

Christmas was about the six month mark of Rich and Betty's marriage.  Rich is my older brother by 18 months and Betty was my new sister in law.  They had gotten married the summer before I moved to France.  It was a simple wedding set in an open field in the National Forest a quarter mile from our house.  We borrowed a tent from the boy scouts and put it in our front yard where we hosted the reception.  Our house was set on five acres overlooking what used to be the open hills between Monument and Colorado Springs.  All of our old family friends were there and family members that we hadn't seen in years.  Everyone looked so happy as people normally do at these staged life events.  Rich looked so in love and Betty looked so naive.  In two years, they would be divorced and Betty would have a restraining order against my brother.