Something is bothering me. It’s causing me to spin again, like a corkscrew slowly turning into the ground and driving me downward. For one thing I can’t turn my mind off, and as it always does, it focuses on the bad things happening in my life. For another, I’ve had some recent changes in relationships with others, friends I thought. Lost contact for a while and I immediately wondered what the hell I did to drive them away.
I don’t understand people and relationships. It seems that it causes more pain in the end, so why put yourself out there? People are untrustworthy, self focused, and quite unpredictable. That’s a bit harsh. My confused mind goes from one extreme to the other.
I know what you’re thinking, why don’t you simply text or email them to see if they’re okay, just to say hi. My mind doesn’t work that way, it always goes to the most negative aspect, and it always ends up where I believe I am to blame for the loss somehow.
But this funk is being driven by something else also, something I need to sit back and figure out. Soon.
The other morning I had an urge to open the cabinet and have a stiff drink of bourbon. Simply pour 3 fingers of Maker’s Mark into a glass, add a couple of ice cubes then gulp the whole thing down. Then just keep drinking to somehow turn off this mind and train of thought. Kill the day drunk, just to get through it.
I have no idea where that came from, wanting a drink to start the day, but it worries me to no end. Even in my most obscene drinking days I never really had a strong urge or desire to drink, and especially not at that hour of the day. I was a night-time drunk. Never felt lonely while I was working, then the night would come and I wanted to turn everything off.
Perhaps it’s this loneliness that fills my days that has brought this on. The disconnect from people and society. You give up and start drinking to kill the loneliness until one day is just like another. A struggle.
I could see myself withdrawing from the world, how easy it would be just to nail the door shut so to speak and never venture outside of the house. The whiskey would blur the days from one to the next until there were no days left.
It will be a problem if I withdraw and give up on people. Problem isn’t the right word. Disaster is much better. It’s heading that direction though.
I need to rethink friendships and relationships in general. See them for what they are, what they mean. Part of this surely relates to moving so many times. Every 9 months to a year off we’d go again. If memory serves me correctly there were 14 moves by the time I was 12. Another dozen to where I’m at now.
No roots, no boyhood friends. Always a new place, trying to fit in and be accepted. Just when life was becoming more tolerable and I was even enjoying myself…bang, another move. You give up trying to make friends, because you were always saying goodbye. Too much for a kid to bear, all those goodbyes. Painful.
I remember that loneliness as a child and find myself in the same frame of mind 60 years later. This funk I’m in.
I could use a drink, just not today.