Today began like the rest during this experiment. I awoke, ate a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios, popped the top on a Diet Coke and then popped my 150 mg Wellbutrin XL. I went to work for a while and then had an appointment with the prescribing doctor at 3PM. We talked for an hour. He told me that he could tell that I was feeling better, that my demeanor was more upbeat and I looked to have energy. He asked me where I would like to be in five years, and I laughed. At times it is hard for me to know where I want to be in five days, much less five years. All I could come up with was: 1) I would like to be married (kid[s] optional in 5 years), 2) I would like to have a mortgage, and 3) I would like to have ventured into a larger more significant writing project (publishing optional).
We talked about how education and creativity open us up to many more options than some people have. I told him that that leads to the “cable television effect”, the one where when we only had three network broadcast channels on TV there was always something good to watch, but now that we have over 200 there is never anything worth watching. We become paralyzed by choice, and I think this has been a predicament for much of my adult life. I have a bit of musical talent, a bit of writing talent, a bit of design talent… but how could I ever choose to pursue one of these solely, or even more than another. He said that these should be viewed as opportunities to me, not burdens, that the thing that I needed to get working the most in my head was my indexing and priority systems. Then decisions would come easier. I thought it would have been great to be able to tell G, “I think Sotto Sotto would be great tonight, I’ve been craving Risotto!” when she asked, “Where would you like to go to dinner?” Indexing, prioritizing. Something is not computing right in the old internal CPU.
I don’t know if the drugs are working or if I am just starting to develop better coping skills, but I have had little glimmers of happiness in the last few days. It seems as if a little of the film that life has covered me in has gotten a few holes in it, in a way, and I – dare I say – feel like myself every now and then.
I still miss G some kind of terribly, but it becomes more bearable. I still am startled a bit when I wake up in the morning and realize that it is a pillow I have my arms around. However, pretty quickly after I get out of bed, I am able to recover and the punch-to-the-gut feeling goes away. I prepare my aforementioned morning cocktail, do a little email and go to work. The afternoons are hard, but not as hard as last week, I still get a little sad when I get home. Even though I know she doesn’t live here anymore, and that indeed we are no longer an “item”, it still is a small surprise every afternoon to find that she indeed is not here. But again, fairly quickly I am able to cope with that as well.
I am starting to realize that my capability of changing anyone’s mind or behavior, except for my own is well near impossible. It is not something I should continue to be so consumed with. I love her with every ounce of my heart, I am sorry for what I have done to her, and I am making important strides toward making sure that my bad behavior and habits do not continue in my life. I cannot live with that, and no one else should have to live with me like that. In the end though, it is not going to make George Bush pull the troops out of Iraq or my boss give me that raise I want at work, and it is not going to make somebody publish Jeremy’s book – and it is surely not going to bring G back to me. I can pray and hope and promise, but ultimately that is her decision and I can do very little to help her decide that I am worth another try, other than try to become the best man I can be, to try to be myself again – and still it will ultimately be her decision, not mine.
When I thought of the clarity that I would have as therapy and medication started to work for me, this wasn’t exactly what I thought. But indeed, this is a type of clarity, and ultimately it is more useful than a I-can-see-clearly-now-the-rain-is-gone kind of clarity. It seems more mature, more handy, more like realizing that life can be more of a three-broadcast-networks kind of affair.
I know that you probably thought that was all of this, and it really is, but I couldn’t figure out where else to put this and I wanted to have everyone read it. It is a quote from Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, a novel I finished a few weeks back. I thought it said something about the situation, and clarity, and a lot of the other things I have been writing about here lately. Toward the end of the book the protagonist, Frank Bascombe, says:
As I’ve said, life has only one certain closure. It is possible to love someone, and no one else, and still not live with that one person or even see her. Anything or anyone who says different is a liar or a sentimentalist or worse. It is possible to be married, to divorce, then come back together with a whole new set of understandings that you’d never have liked or even understood before in your earlier life, but that to your surprise now seem absolutely perfect. The only truth that can never be a lie, let me tell you, is life itself – the thing that happens.
Take care guys!
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