So I sit here now with this feeling that I have had the past few days off and on. It is a terrifying suffocating feeling which seems to be partly brought on by congestion and partly by a deep internal yearning for spring yet neither really have anything to do with the feeling itself and it often is triggered at a time in which nothing directly initiates it. Such as driving down the road and suddenly this massive panic sets upon me and then it subsides a moment later but leaves me with the thoughts which I can not shake...
This feeling is one I think can be equated to what a new college graduate must feel when they truly realize that they are done being secluded in the safety of their school and now they must face the world and make their own way... yes sure they are supposed to be ready to take on the world and they are supposed to feel that they can but deep down there is some part of them that has this feeling and is just lost....
Well I am stuck with this feeling...
Here I am at 35 years old and I am just now for the first time in my whole fucking life worried about my future and my kids' future and what the fuck am I going to do with myself????
Now some may say, “well it took long enough” and some may say, “grow up already” but I don’t really give a fuck about that. For the first time in my life I am actually scared of something and I mean really scared, like unable to breathe, eat or sleep scared....
Here is this feeling.... I will walk outside in the snow and it is slightly warmer than it has been so my thoughts turn to spring coming soon although we are not even two weeks into winter and I can almost smell that scent that comes into the air when the snows melt and things start turning green again, I can almost feel it and I start to look forward to it and then it happens. This paralyzing feeling takes hold of me, I literally can not breathe, I gasp, I panic. I realize spring may come but I am still going to be stuck in the same spot. I can not get out of this hole I have buried myself in and it is killing me, slowly and surely it is killing me. I know there must be a way out but I have been ignoring it for so long and pretending it doesn't matter and it will all work out for so long that I really have no fucking clue how to get out or really how I even got here.
I haven't worried enough about it up till this point that there is no way I can handle it now and I am just stuck with this complete and utter feeling of hopelessness....
A long time ago I wrote about others that made it through life and became their parents and had jobs and families and houses and I said they were the lucky ones cause they didn't know any better to want more, to want to see more, to want to do something different and fuck if its more true to me now than ever, they are they lucky ones. I spent so much time thinking that I was meant for more, that there was something special in store for me that I just had to find out what it was and then everything would be laid out for me that I missed out on getting set for the rest. So, now I realize I have totally fucked up everything for myself and my family because I can't figure out what that special thing is and fuck, maybe there is nothing special about me after all except this feeling...
This feeling which is driving me to want to change everything about my life right now, I want to sell my house, drive away, take the kids to see places I have seen, hang out with the homeless kids in Key West, feed the little raccoons on St George Island, buzz through New Orleans, follow the gulf to Padre Island, make our way across New Mexico to explore Arizona from those pine forests to the canyons and deserts but how can I...
Now you may think that like in the past I am just drunk and getting lost in my head like I am prone to do but here is the truly scary thing. For some reason which I can not even begin to explain I have not had a single drink of alcohol for 9 days and counting. To put this in perspective for you I can honestly say that for at least the last 14 years I have not made it more than 2 days without drinking with one notable exception and that is when my first son was born and I stayed with my wife in the hospital for four days straight and did not drink. With that exception I have drank and drank pretty heavily by most standards every night since December 1996….only taking an occasional night off due to some extenuating circumstance or a test of myself … Now I have gone 9 days straight without drinking and part of me wants to keep going just to see how far I can make it while another part of me very much desires to drink and drink heavily and that part will probably win out tomorrow but I am holding it off for one more night so I can write this clearly…
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