It’s been quite some time since I’ve written anything of much substance here, certainly even longer since I have utilized neevita as a sounding board or makeshift therapist as opposed to a marketing campaign.
I continue to grow and surprise myself, though at a softer pace now. I thought it was time to write an update for posterity, since some pretty big stuff has happened recently.
Once upon a time, I saw myself as a transformation catalyst, and I carried the weight of multiple dying worlds on my shoulders. I was determined to heal myself as I helped others heal, to teach as I learned, and to somehow make a name, even perhaps a living, out of that grueling process. I’ve since given that up, for many reasons, not the least of which being that it didn’t actually work.
In my youth I wanted, first and foremost, to be remembered. For a long time it didn’t matter to me if I was fondly or with great disdain. Impact was the important part, being known and seen, even if askew. I said and did a lot of fucked up shit in service to that want, in service to a malignant transparency that I felt at the time would protect me from pain and betrayal.
I’ve learned over time how deeply unethical I was in perpetuating and even at times glorifying the harm I was trying to address by sharing so openly and rawly, where actual humans were absorbing and attempting to help carry me in a way that was cruel and unsustainable. It is impossible to quantify the damage I caused, but I’ve made efforts, some successful and some not, and over these past quiet years have come to terms with the hopelessly indescribable enormity of it all.
For every small victory I enjoyed, I was constantly triggering myself, others, and letting people down. I showed my stripes openly basically everywhere, but most of that writing is gone now, lost to the periodic internet suicides that permeated my social media interactions. I’m pretty sure, however, that for every inspiring, hopeful, strongly worded cut the shit sociological piece I wrote about my breakthroughs, there exists at least one scathing, horrifyingly abusive receipt to offset it.
The reality of my decisions looms invisibly in the air on a distant horizon, coloring every choice I make and every speculation I have about my future. As I’ve come to terms with how I chose to live my life and treat my relationships, I’ve avoided making any bold moves, thinking bold thoughts, or opening myself up again. There is nothing I can do to take any of it back. I’ve realized that on one level of consciousness or another, I’ve lived my entire life tightly coiled, waiting to be struck down by the past I lived when I didn’t think I’d ever get this far.
Understanding this has lead me to profoundly change how I move in the world. I no longer seek leadership in groups, or see myself as the type of person destined to influence others through organizing or being a figurehead of some kind. I no longer model my life around incessantly chasing notoriety, and have found that inviting public scrutiny in every aspect of my existence directly fed into many of my most destructive cycles.
So I don’t much post here anymore, I no longer keep a tell-all blog, no longer have a mailing list, a patreon, or a public facing business. I actively avoid social media and other situations in which I appear to be amassing a following or may otherwise find myself elevated or seen as a mentor, and have been single for over eight years.
Visibility is a double edged sword that was keeping me from truly accepting myself, and part of that acceptance has been reckoning with the fact that I was not fit for the responsibilities I took on by forcing myself again and again into the spotlight, and into positions of relative power over the people I was engaging with.
These changes and the space they created eventually lead to my going no contact with my step father earlier this year, effectively severing a toxic and invalidating connection with the man who parentified and groomed me to be a partner to him as a child.
Periodically running up against his utter refusal to take accountability for his mistakes and their impacts which robbed me of my childhood, my family, and disabled me forever, turns out, was a big factor in my ongoing lack of ability to treat myself and the intimates in my life with grace no matter how much other shit I’d learned or overcome.
Without doing that, regardless of how often we communicated or saw one another, my sense of his needs as my only remaining family member continued to loom over mine, my life continued to revolve around preparing to abandon myself to take care of him and manage his death, and I continued to be a flaming hypocrite as I discovered more and more parts of myself that didn’t align with those choices.
My views on redemption, loss, and what audience anyone might ‘owe’ me, particularly from my past, completely changed during this process. The day my dad chose to leave my life rather than apologize for his failures as a parent subtitlely changed everything, and a repair effort I waited thirty years hoping for that he never once showed he was capable of making was no longer my burden to bear alone.
While I will always struggle with both my past action and my generational inheritance, having to examine and cross examine myself in a constant state of precarious recovery to move with integrity, it will no longer be with his baggage and the obligation he groomed into me quietly chained around my neck.
I know how desperately he tried to do right by me, how vehemently he thought he was being a good dad, a good man, and a decent person. I know it because I lived my own version of it modeled by him. But he was wrong, and in the 30+ years I waited for him to treat me like a fucking human being, I eventually had to accept that he would never, ever, authentically acknowledge it.
Though a life of ongoing solitude and obscurity has its appeal, in the coming years, I may venture back to society at large, and begin to show my face again. In doing so, it’s inevitable I’ll be tasked with the same sort of challenge my dad failed to face up to; a challenge I know I have failed to face up to before myself. It’s daunting and scary, but the alternative is far, far worse. I’ve felt it firsthand, and I don’t want to “turn out”, aka continue to be, that way.
Accountability starts at home, and for the first time in my 43 years of this chemical flesh prison, I truly have all of myself at my disposal. All those years it felt like the searching and the digging would never end, but I did eventually reach my bedrock, and I did eventually claim and embrace the parts of me that had been left alone and trapped there.
I feel a sense of profound relief now, that I’ll be paying the consequences of my actions for the rest of my life. Good. I can finally stop trying to outrun myself, and consequently, stop living trapped by a past I can’t change or make up for. I can finally fucking let those circumstances, those denials and deflections, and those people, go. Which is some big stuff that I don’t think I really ever expected to actually accomplish in my lifetime.
It’s not just another chapter, this one. It’s the beginning of another book in my series. I thought that was worth writing a little something about.