July 11, 1982

Friday, July 11, 2014

I have felt a little low throughout the day and I can’t quite discern what is contributing to my malaise…other than the deep psychological work I am continuing to do.  I’ve been wondering lately if I should perhaps avoid watching this television show called Criminal Minds.  I’ve actually watched it enough in the last six months to not infrequently come across episodes I have already seen.

A recently aired episode (which I had previously seen) featured the story of a con man who used a number of aliases as a means of creating not just professional success but also multiple relationships with women.  He was married to one of the women and had a son with her.  But he was meanwhile involved with other women.  The maddening depth of his deceit was revealed in the course of the episode; the man’s nine year old is present when his father is shot to death by the FBI.  The boy was, of course, deeply frightened and horrified by his father’s death.  Was he traumatized?  I would say that is a reasonable conclusion to come to.  Watching the boy suffer such a catastrophic loss reminded me of how I nearly experienced that very type of loss when I was almost the same age.  In other words, I keep finding my thoughts drifting back to the summer of 1982 when I was eight years old.

What happened on July 11, 1982?  I cannot really recall.  That summer still remains such a blank.  Will I ever recall a lot more? I do not know.  But I am willing to if doing so will somehow help me in my life now.  That summer seems to have been quite unremarkable with the exception of my father’s near-death.  I wish I had happy memories from that summer.  But I do not.

Here in the present some thirty-two years later I continue to do my best each and every day to move forward in a new direction.  Some days I feel patient.  Some days I feel encouraged.  And then there are other days I just want to hide and not even emerge out into the world at all.  Recovery, as I have frequently noted, is never a straight line.

What were the highlights of this day?  I met with my future personal trainer at the YMCA this morning.  I also exercised at the gym before meeting with him.  I pushed myself to run as fast as I could manage.  That was fun.  I also tried to remember what it was like to run around as a kid with little conscious thought to the demands that running exacts on the body.  In this way children and adults can be very different.

And I learned about a job in Hawaii that I am going to apply to.

I’m grateful it is the weekend.