Oh, The Things You Can Find If You Don’t Stay Behind….If Only I Could Catch Up

So I wasn’t able to sleep last night.  I am an avid reader of everything make-believe.  I can read about a book a week and sometimes, like last night, a book a night.  I usually read series because I go through them so fast, but I am currently out of books.  I don’t know what to start and so I have not been reading at all.  Well, last night my wife gave me the book “Looking for Alaska”.  She told me I should read it because I should know what my kids are reading.

So I started reading this book at 10:00pm last night and finished it at 2:30am.  Then I lied awake until 8:30am and I needed to get up.  I am not going to tell you about the book but I loved the book and I hated the book and I hate it when my wife has me read things that bring up stuff from my past.  Without spoiling the book for anyone who wants to read it, the book can be about forgiving yourself and other people.  There was one specific paragraph that I was drawn to immediately when I read it:

…that I forgave him, and that she forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth.  There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and left undone that day.  Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future.  If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions.  But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless.

I hope I can get to this point, but for right now I am stuck in my own place.

Now why did I hate the book?  Well, the book is about dealing with losses and it brought up memories of my best friend dying when I was in 7th grade.  I have never been to a funeral since that one.  I don’t know that I could ever go back to one.  That was one of the hardest points in my life (until now) and I really did not have anyone to support me through it.  So I did the best I could.  I just hardened up and moved on.  I didn’t make anymore close friends and I have always kept everyone at a distance until my wife broke through some of that shell.  And then the OW.

I feel I am a lot father back down that path again where I have my walls built up and I don’t know who I can let in.  I know I am the one that shattered the life that I built and I know I am the one who has to work to rebuild it but it is hard when you don’t know where to begin.  I have destroyed all trust with the only people I have trusted. How do you rebuild trust with someone you may not fully trust yourself.  It is a conundrum not easily solved.

I am trying to work on me and hoping that it will allow me to work on us.  I have issues, we have issues, but I really do want to move forward and catch up to everyone else in this rat race, in our own rat race.  But I don’t know that forgiveness is real.  Is it forgiveness or forgetting or learning?  Or all of them?  I don’t think that I can forget and I definitely have learned more than I ever have wanted.

Maybe forgiveness is moving forward and just letting go of the past, but I have never done that before.  I have always thought that if I keep the past close then I can keep it under control.  I can manage those demons and keep them from getting out.  They are a constant reminder of what I have had happen and what I don’t want to happen again.  So maybe not forgiving myself is the way to keep a constant reminder of what I almost lost.  What I may still lose?

I am not looking for forgiveness from my wife.  She has made her position very clear that this is my mess to deal with and I will.  I want to be angry at so many people because of this, but in the end it was still my choice to do what I did and so I really can only be angry at myself.  I had to drive an hour to meet up with her and I did, that is a lot of time to talk myself out if it and I didn’t.  I lied repeatedly to my wife for which I am so ashamed of because I have always been up front and honest with everyone I deal with in my work life and up until then my personal life and that is what I teach my kids to do as well.  In one sense I am glad they do not know, but I feel like a constant hypocrite.

I feel like I am rambling but that is what you get when you have no sleep, incoherent thoughts.

Oh, the things you can find if you don’t stay behind – Dr. Seuss

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