Confessions From the Fog

A vice grip can be a handy tool. It can also be a metaphor used to define situations in which life is pressing down on all sides leaving one with little to no room to even exist. St. Paul makes reference to this. Money can be a vice grip when you live paycheck to paycheck and all your money is gone the day you get it and somebody always wants more. Friends and loved ones can pull you in different directions and, if you're a people pleaser like me, you can't satisfy them all and somebody is left feeling disdain.

The situation quickly becomes a mountain it seems impossible to surmount. And there you sit. 

Because of negative cognitive bias, we tend to only focus on the bad things, and it becomes like a dark veil overshadowing all the good things happening. Or a very dense fog that when you try to look through it all you see is a gloomy nothingness so close it's suffocating. 

How does one combat it? I'm currently trying to figure that out. 

When the sun does manage to come out and burn that fog away, the positives that shine through seem to be frail, fleeting moments of joy before night falls and the crippling fog sets back in, leaving one clueless as to when the sun will come out again, and this can be even worse than a vice grip, squeezing ever harder as like an addict fixating on his next high one seeks out the happiness that has just eluded. Motivation to do anything evaporates, as one no longer finds joy in things they once did. 

And the vice grip tightens, and even more pressure is exuded. All internalized, all encompassing stress constricts one's ability to think or act or do. One goes through the motions day in and day out, and even that is trying, like trying to get through one's day with a migraine. Life becomes a migraine, and all one wants to do is sleep. 

And then sleep comes, and you wake up in that same fog, not feeling rested at all. 

Not feeling anything at all. 

Nativity in Nothingness

As a husband and father currently living apart from his family due to economic situations semi-outside of his control, it becomes a substantial task to define the word "Home". for the first 10 years of my life I grew up in Suburban Milwaukee and the subsequent two thirds of my life was spent in an exurb about an hour away, and as such I cannot really ever use the phrase "born and raised in", or really claim to have a hometown, and for the last year of my life I've spent it split between two hour-away exurbs of the aforementioned Milwaukee. As such my children will also be in my predicament of never being able to claim a hometown. 

But is that really such a bad thing? One shouldn't be known by the identifying place of birth, not even the place one spent most of one's life. That should not define a person. 

But what is home?

When you're in my not-so-interesting predicament of having to decide between four plus cities to take up residence in, the question becomes muddled with very conflicting scenarios. These scenarios are further complicated by the fact that no two family units are alike, and what matters to one might not be so much a factor in another. One parent's job in one city, the other's in a different, children at school, parents and family in both, not really having a strong affinity for either city really...the difficulties mount. 

Through it all what I really want, aside from one roof, is some clarity. Direction. I want to know that whatever choice is made, it is what's best. The peace of "home" that some people take for granted, is everything I want right now. 

And not to have that makes me feel defeated. 

To not know what to do, to feel helpless in your current situation, to equate it with a hopeless cause, is one of the worst feelings. To struggle with it day after day is brutal. St. Jude pray for us. 

My life in recent years seems to be possible to parallel a plot line of Grey's Anatomy, complete with family drama from multiple sides, LVADs and heart transplants, deaths of family members, recently discovered family previously unknown, family secrets coming to light, diagnoses of autism, mental disorders, cardiomyopathy, on again off again platonic relationships, moving in and moving out, rushing around while life happens in the middle of it. For me, I identify closely with Meredith's coming to terms with her neuroses. I've learned a lot about myself over the past seven years, things I never realized about myself or had never taken the time to acknowledge. 

Home. 

The question quickly turns to "How quickly can I rectify my current situation" from "What's best for my family" and then becomes a dichotomy that my brain bounces back and forth between. But then...is it a false dichotomy, in that the two can overlap? Maybe it's not black and white. Maybe it's a gray of "What's best for my family IS to quickly rectify my current situation", that regardless of what locality we choose to base our particular family unit out of, we will truly be...home.

Easier said than done, because cognitive bias steps in to have its say, and soon you find yourself right back where you started from. And days, weeks, months pass, and nothing ever changes. 

To put it bluntly, a radical fire of change needs to be lit under my ass to get the ball rolling. But fire burns, and I don't like pain. But maybe it's a cathartic, purifying burn that will generate a Phoenix of loveliness that I, in my current situation and state of mind, cannot fathom.