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Leaving the bubble behind

It has taken me almost six months to write this post. It’s been floating in my head for a long time. Since she left really. But I had to really know what I wanted to say. This isn’t a breakup post with a person or a closing of a chapter.

This is an end.

I feel like the straw that broke the camels back came from realizing that I was better away from everything that once made me whole. It was better for me to cut the cord on my past. All an individual builds on top of is what has happened to them. My foundation crumbled. I picked up the pieces that I wanted (or needed) to salvage. At first I tried to build a shelter from the pieces. That didn’t work. Instead I found myself forced to start over.

When I first moved out to San Francisco, I didn’t find myself investing in being here for long. One foot was already out of the door on my way back home to what I knew and to where I was king of my own domain. To say the least, that plan exploded in my face. Looking back now, I think it may be the best thing to have happened to me in an utterly perverse and masochistic way. I scratched and crawled to keep things as they were. I failed.

What I didn’t realize was how this was really an ending, and not a turn in the road. The turn had happened almost ten years previously. I had finally found the dead end that I had chased for a decade.

I honestly don’t know what I did next. There’s this emotional and mental block for a big stretch of the past spring and summer. I think what really happened was that someone else, or some group of someone elses, just kept me going. They were very much guardian angels without wings.

It was only after the last family vacation that we will ever have that I found myself both relieved of, and in some regards forgiven for, my past. Whatever the gorilla was, and I never really figured out what it was, it was gone.

In coming home from that trip I found that I was a borne again believer in myself. I never really realized how little confidence in myself I had left.

Since that trip, and the month of fasting that came immediately after it, I think that I have finally focused on what matters the most. I’ve refilled my confidence tank. My health, my personal development, my friends, my family, my love were all second class citizens. Now they are first on my mind, and first in my heart. It took me a long time to find that too.

It took me six months to write this post because in many ways I was mourning the death of who I was. That kid was really amazing in so many ways. The kind of guy you root for in the movies. I think that he got lost in himself somewhere, and the rest as they say is history. I can’t say that I will miss him, but I can say there is a hole where he once was. Instead of looking back, I can look ahead and declare…

This is now a beginning.