"Imagine that the Whisky is the Fire"
"...and that the message is that which is known only to the soul of man" (McCullers, 1936, p. 203). I have decided to write this blog to help chronicle my severe battle with mental illness and subsequent recovery that robbed me of the latter part of my 20s and reconcile the emotional, physical, and mental abuse I endured as a young boy.
Regarding the former, at the time I was engaged to the woman who would later become my wife, and life was pretty good; one day I walked into our home and the TV was tuned to SportsCenter. Funny the things you remember when a tragic event occurs, and within a span of minutes, my life began to change. What I saw on that screen triggered something deep inside of me, I am not quite comfortable specifying what that "trigger" was but I need to write about this battle; my hope is that it will be cathartic.
Within minutes an absurd obsession started to grow, at first, it was just a small needle lightly probing at my thoughts seeking to pervade my mindset. It grew exponentially in the next few months; as a man, you think that you can deal with everything that is presented to you, that no matter what happens you can fix it. I sought to suppress my thoughts, however, the more I tried this method the more entangled the tentacles became in my mind. Soon thereafter I was not able to think about anything else but this absurd, illogical situation. I started writing goodbye letters to everyone I loved...
I was raised by my paternal Grandmother who was a product of the Great Depression; Jessie had a 5th-grade education and worked in a cotton mill for 40+ years. I'll write more about her later, she was a great woman. My father was a violent alcoholic who would all too often take his swill filled anger out on us. We were hostages to my father; it is a funny dynamic to love someone, but hate them at the same time. I do not know if I will ever reconcile those feelings. My childhood memories of my father consisted of him threatening my Grandmother and I, the police continually being called, in a small mill village everyone knows everyone, and I was reduced to being the town drunk's son. My mother well was absent, I only have a few memories of my mother up until the age of around 9 or 10 when I went to live with her because my father's violence had reached a breaking point. Being threatened with death when you are 9 or 10 years makes you look for any avenue out.
Anything had to be better than that right?
Well, in this instance I traded physical violence for mostly indifference and sometimes physical or emotional abuse by my step-father whose actions were upheld by mother. I remember one day saying, "Hello" to a guy from school at a gas station who had always been kind to me. My mother called my step-father and both proceeded threatened to kick me out on the street at 9 because apparently me responding was being a bad influence on my two younger sisters; no exaggeration, all for saying "Hello." I remember shortly thereafter my stepfather picking me up by my throat and collar and slamming my small 10-year-old body through a door; the door broke from the impact. This was not enough, however, then I was picked up and slammed into a wooden wall. I broke free from his grasp and ran to a tent I had set up in the woods, a sort of enclave from where I would escape from a world intent on eating my innocence.
Somewhere in the midst of all this dysfunction, and abuse, I developed a love for reading. I could escape all of the bad things, do you remember when Jenny and Forrest would pray to God, "make me a bird so I can fly far, far away" in Forrest Gump, reading was my equivalent of their prayer. I loved words, where they could take me, how they made me feel, the unbridled potential that existed on paper. Carson McCullers sums these feelings up for me in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe...
" A weaver might look up suddenly and see for the first time the cold, weird radiance of midnight January ski, and a deep fright at his own smallness may stop his heart."
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