Sunday, November 18, 2012

The Perfect Storm - Part 1

Many of you know that for the past 18 months, I have not done much blogging. In fact, for the past 18 months my life has been characterized by a series of intense struggles in a cyclical pattern with two dominant and alternating themes, sometimes concurrent: struggles in my marriage, and struggles with God.

About month or so out of HeartChange, I had a premonition that dark days were ahead. I had a vision of gathering storm clouds just visible on the horizon, and I knew struggles like I never knew before were imminent. It took 10 more months before the storm hit, and it gathered in intensity the entire time. 

Then The Storm hit in October, 2011. 

The Storm lasted 13 months. I am not proud of what happened during this time. But I can't change the past, so I will own it, learn from it, and move on. And blog about it. 

No one knows how they will respond to real life issues until the moment they come face to face with the problem staring him down. Yeah, everyone says that they'll do this or never do that. Wishful thinking. There is not a person alive who is not capable of the most abominable acts given the right set of circumstances, regardless of previous convictions and bravado. 

Take for example the American practice of eugenics during the 1920's. It began as a means to cull American society of its "lesser desirable" elements, a "noble" aim in the eyes of the intelligentsia of the day. There were many forced sterilizations during this time, based on IQ, physical features, family histories of deformity and disease, social class, and even skin color. In the eyes of those who created the system and implemented it, they had the noble aim of making the human race better. The consequence of these actions was mass suffering, not just within our own shores, but also in Europe. Hitler's primary source for inspiration for his murder of 10 million people were the eugenics programs in the United States. The Land of Free and the Home of Brave, where the words of Emily Lazarus echoed from shore to shore: 
"... Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
for many became the land of shattered dreams, the simple dreams of family and children. And we gave birth to a true monster in our pride and arrogance so that a few people could sleep well at night, deceiving themselves into believing they were acting out of the best interest for American society and the human race at large.

So don't bother arguing with me that you will never do this or that. You can, and you will, when the right set of circumstances leads you to that decision point.

Landfall
The leading edge of the storm started off calm enough, deceptively so. The light faded so gradually that by the time I realized I couldn't see a thing, the full fury of the storm hit. 
In mid October, 2011, I announced that I wanted to leave my wife. I felt stifled, hampered, held back, hurt, and very, very afraid. God had been silent for a while already. She had no idea this was coming. She had even thought that the year previous was the best we year yet. I blind-sided her. I talked to our pastor first, knowing he would be apposed. We went through some counseling with him and his wife for a while. It seemed to help somewhat, but it didn't change my inner-turmoil very much. God was still silent, and I didn't have much hope or faith that things would turn around.

What I was afraid of I will not touch on here. Suffice it to say I gazed into the abyss within my own soul, and something truly terrifying, sensed but unseen, watching from the lightless shadows, stared back. It blinked.

Lowering Barometric Pressure
The wind screamed like the wail of a banshee, threatening to scour away my sanity while the storm surge tried to drown me. The towering waves that rode the surge had as their singular aim my crushed corpse.
As The Storm intensified, the pain within me grew. I began to feel like the song from Serenity, an Austrian symphonic metal band, entitled Fairytales. Parts of the song resonated, though not all aspects of the song applied. But the hurt expressed in the song - that's what I felt.

There were things that happened early in our marriage that hurt me deeply. These I could not let go of, and over years of our marriage the wounds never healed, and everything that happened, every word spoken, every action taken or not taken, I viewed through the prism of that pain.  I had asked God for help dealing with it over the years, and my pleas were answered with silence.  I had asked him to take it away. No response. I asked for aide in overcoming it. Silence. And yet I knew that if it could not be taken care of, it would destroy my family. 

In the last year God was more absent then ever before. My cries for help bounced off the heavens and back at me, their echoes seeming to make mockery of my faith.

In May, 2012, the crushing weight of the storm and the pain became unbearable. I had to talk to someone. I tried to talk to our pastor again, but he wasn't available. I was reaching critical mass, and if I could not release some pressure, I was going to snap. I would be lying if I said I had not thought of hurting myself. Debating what followed as right or wrong is now no longer an issue. What happened is in the past, and there is nothing I can do to change that.

I had no one else around here I felt I could talk to, so I went to FaceBook, in a private group, and blew off steam. To my friends in the area that may be reading this, I am sorry. My state of mind was such that I truly couldn't think straight. I said things I shouldn't have said. I characterized my wife as a monster. I trashed her. I decimated her. I destroyed her. And most of what I said, I can't even remember saying. It came out, and then it was gone, like poisonous gasses escaping from a volcano, reducing the pressure in the core, but at the cost destroying all living things nearby. 

And then my wife found out about it. I prefer to think of what happened as her getting exposed to the poisonous fumes. To say she was hurt does not do justice to how she felt.

This happened again in July, when I entered a period of intense depression following a nine day hospital stay due to an accident at the dump involving a four inch rusty bolt going into my knee but not through it, rather angling down and damaging the top of my tibia. Six hours after the initial injury, an infection had set into my leg and the pain was so intense I could no longer walk. I had a high fever, alternating severe chills and sweats, and less than 24 hours after the initial injury, I found myself being transported by ambulance to the hospital, where I was admitted immediately. They put me on very heavy antibiotics, four different kinds at one point if I remember correctly. 

The Eye
Sunshine. Dead calm. Too calm. No sign of life anywhere. Not even the tweeting or birds or the buzzing of insects. The sun warmed my skin through the tattered remnants of my clothes, teasing me with hope.
Late July, maybe August, I entered a period where I seemed to do better. I can only guess that I past through the eye wall at some point. But it didn't last. The Storm merely gathered in intensity and proceeded to hit with greater strength. I came close to losing my mind. The inner pressure was so strong that I felt like I was going to be turned inside out or disintegrated. 

Plunging Back Through the Eye Wall
The world went dark once again. As the last ray of daylight faded in the west, The Storm resumed it's onslaught. The counter winds ripped at what the first half of the storm had left. It didn't seem like the storm could get any worse. I was wrong.
September saw my inner turmoil intensify. I thought I hurt before. But not like this. The first half of the storm had stripped away any shelter I had. I was wounded and raw and exposed to the elements. The best thing I could do was try to tie myself to something so I wouldn't get blown away, but I couldn't find any rope. God was still conspicuously absent. My faith was in shambles. My marriage held together only because I hadn't physically left. 

I had one lucid moment in late September where I recognized the signs of impending mental break. My mood swings became increasing erratic and my job performance suffered. The smallest things would get me angry. My short term memory was all but gone. I think I was within weeks, possibly days, of snapping. And I remembered my job's Employee Assistance Program, which provided free of charge a certain amount of counseling and referrals to continued counseling if needed. I called and got plugged into a counselor very quickly. Call it providence if you want to, but guess what the name of my therapist is? Hope. Through Hope's guidance I began learning ways to constructively deal with my issues.

I also made contact with a friend of mine in Texas, and he said come on down so that I could get away for a while. This I did in mid October. I didn't care what happened at this point. I needed to get away from my wife for a while and think. My mind was such a mass of confusion that I could not objectively look at anything. He told me about his church. Miracles happened at there, he said. Literally. They had a program for people who were going through hell. I was able to attend twice. I would have gone three times, but my visit had to get cut short due to circumstances beyond all of our control. Whether a miracle happened there or not, I don't know. But going to Texas helped. A lot.

While there, though, the storm hurled all that remained of its pent up fury. One phone call from my wife resulted in my openly declaring that we were now officially separated. I had no intention of returning home at that point. Going back to the area I worked, yes, but not to my home. By the end of the week she stood down on something she said, but I still had no intention of going home. For all I was concerned, it was over. I didn't know where I was going to live, but I figured I would find some accommodations, even if it was a drafty garage. 

Finally, after some pretty intense discussion and sharing with my friend, I came to the conclusion that I would return home and try again.  I've been back for two weeks now, and the winds are dying down. 

Where God is in all this I still don't know. Maybe He protected me through The Storm. Maybe He just watched from distance to see what I would do. I don't know. When I decided to come back, I told my friend that I still didn't know what to do with God. But I was going to try to recover the marriage, with or without Him.

Daybreak
Sometime during the night I must have passed out. I awoke to the sun rising in the east. The wind had calmed, the waves were gone, the surge had retreated, and birds were singing.

(Click here to read Part Two)

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