I Had a Lot of Cats

February 27, 2021

A year ago, I found myself at the edge of a red-rimmed cliff in Santa Fe - debating whether to jump.

I stood there in the chill wind and dropping temperature, watching the sun slink off behind the winter mountains, dust plumes and storm clouds stealing the sunset.

Shivering, I felt a part of the darkness, watching the pinpricks of vibrant orange come alight in the hilltop homes down below in the foothills with a romanticized envy for all of the happiness I imagined going on in the kitchens and living rooms.

I remember standing there for a long time before I sat down on the dusty lip to let my feet dangle above the drop and caught a flutter of movement beside me, nearly falling from the ledge as I lurched back. But it wasn’t a snake or an animal, just a small black journal wedged under a boulder, fluttering in the gusts.

I pried it out, flipping through the first couple pages in the muted blue glow of my phone. But it was empty. Just a beat-up moleskine and an old red fountain pen with the words Drink Me engraved on it.

Looking back, I now believe that the notebook had been left there for me, or someone like me. One of those discoveries that can create or destroy a person, shifting my trajectory in such deep-rooted ways that I now feel obliged to continue what was started for the next set of eyes to find… for you.

I thought nothing of it for several weeks until I was sifting my belongings and found the journal in my jacket pocket, tossing it onto the rumpled bed where it spilled open to a secret I’d missed.

It wasn’t empty. Instead of the beginning, the writing began near the back. I read the first page, then another. It was captivating. A profound and painful series of insights that broke me down to my basest parts.

Forty-seven pages of powerful prose that I read and then re-read that night, and so many nights since. A lifetime condensed. It could have been me, was me in a way. And I was entranced.

Though it has taken a year to write my response, I decided that very night that I would add ten pages to the masterpiece that follows, counting backwards from where his story begins.

Do not look for me after you finish reading. I will not mention my name just as he does not mention his. This journal is now yours… yours to read, to add to, to share with another, or yours to ignore and discard.

I will not blame you if you stop here and throw it away. I am no stranger to pointless destruction and idle carelessness.

Until recently, I was a liar. It may not sound like much out of context but in some ways, it is the worst of crimes, a slow erosion of integrity and meaning inflicted daily upon loved ones and strangers alike. I breathed deception and spread it like a disease. It was my safety valve, a defense mechanism - how I created alternate realities to live in and compartmentalize an impressive stack of tragedies, self-made and otherwise.

The lies we tell others are the lies we come to believe in ourselves, slippery illusions that deflect responsibility and muddle awareness, stunt growth, and undermine progress. I was a master of gas lighting though it all seemed harmless and overblown in the moment.

To this day I have trouble admitting that a lie is a weapon, a live-by-the-sword die-by-the-sword medieval piece of sharpened iron that can disembowel a human being with a simple flick of the wrist.

The truth is hard. I wanted everything to come easy. Early in life I associated being real with painful struggle. I had reasons. Good reasons. Some really bad things happened to me. But at some point, no matter how valid your reasons, life forces you to choose how you are going to deal.

For years I chose not to deal, preferring to wallow in rationalizations and spiral, saying the right words to the right people because I knew what they should be, but inwardly feeding destructive impulses that I refused to examine because you cannot just let one cat out of the bag and I had a lot of cats.

To understand where this story is going, you have to know a little more about me.

I look, well, exceedingly normal. You would never guess the scope of my strange roundabout journey through life nor the abundance of abnormal issues I carry from a glance or even a conversation. I’ve been told that I’m wasting a brilliant mind, and I certainly seem capable of complex intellectual problem solving that others struggle to make sense of.

But I’ve come to learn that intelligence is a thing of logic and thought, a tool capable of great disassociations and complex mental games rooted in blinding self-deception. People mock dumb, but dumb with a good heart offers the kind of satisfying and simple existence I long for.

Instead, I have a battered center that at any sign of hurt or the mere possibility of some unwanted feeling rising to the surface, will seal up in a command bunker and remotely order night time air raids upon friends and enemies alike, dropping missiles and propaganda leaflets in equal proportions.

My lack of heart is my lack of integrity. Perhaps it’s not my fault. After all, at four, maybe six, something went down that I will spare you the uncomfortable minutia of but involved two neighbors forcing their child and their child’s best friend into sexual reenactments while they watched and played.

Honestly, I don’t even remember much anymore, but there was a period years back where shards of sharp memories were forcing their way out through the skin of my brain, unwanted vivid details stabbing into my dreams with cruel precision until I finally figured out what was going on. It was almost like the act of finally acknowledging the incidents allowed the individual memories to move on because where I hadn’t been able to think of anything else, once admitted out loud the images stopped hounding me and faded to a general understanding that I had been abused.

It’s hard to grow up internalizing feelings of being vividly different on the inside until one day you realize you aren’t just inherently different but were made different by someone’s perversions.

The outbursts of anger I had growing up, explained. A confusingly inherent distrust of intimacy and my desperate craving for physical space when someone pushes too closely up on me, suddenly very reasonable. The lashing out, the stealing and running away, the cries for attention and desperate need for someone to recognize and address the secret that I didn’t even know I was carrying.

It didn’t help that I dealt with the bundle of strangeness and struggle that was me beneath the surface by engaging in fifteen years of weed and drug use from thirteen to twenty-eight.

Carpet bombing your brain is an effective strategy to avoid dealing with the nitty gritty issues lingering in your psyche like anxious patients in the waiting room of a therapist running late. But when I stopped numbing, I realized that the pieces of the past I should probably dig out and address were now gone, overwritten on my mental hard drive. How do you cope when you have systematically wiped out everything you need to confront?

Then my girlfriend got pregnant on our third date, a baked mussels and Saki bomb night that I still look back on as one of the most tangible and fully present experiences of my life. It was one of the few times my brain took a backseat to my gut and it was epic. I lived, loved, and conceived, all in a few hours.

Then I messed up.

Old issues resurfaced like circling sharks. I was caught off guard by the unexpected fear of being like my own father and stopped showing up, which is ironically exactly what he did. I justified the inaction as needing space to think but it came across as unreliability in critical moments.

We fought. Nasty ugly fights. We were still new to each other and it was easy to hurt and be hurt. She threatened an abortion while secretly wanting me to stop her, and I agreed while secretly wanting her to change her mind. A struggle ensued for who would give in first.

In the checkup the day before the event, my better half fought free and I told her I loved her and wanted to keep our daughter. My best released hers and we shared our decision, but the nurse said it was too late, the process in process. It was a shock as we’d never been told that the last chance had come and passed. Never been given that final opportunity to change our minds.

Weeks later we learned that she had either been mistaken or intensely cruel, for nothing irreversible had occurred, but in the moment, we believed, and the nurse sent us home lost and broken, crushed.

I tried to support her through an ending neither of us wanted. Looking back I wonder at my the level of energetic blame, for I had spent decades cultivating an aura of living deception so of course in my moment of truth a lie would emerge from the shadows to drag me back into the darkness, stealing away a child and a building block for a family that fell apart without it.

I stayed because it was the right thing to do, because so many people in my life had abandoned me, but I was not up for the task. It would have been better to part and heal and come back. Instead I stayed but lied, checked out, and cheated in my mind. I retreated, built walls, lashed out, and refused to deal with the riot building in my emotions, the blame, the guilt, one trauma spurring on all the angry angsty rest.

Sixteen months later I stood on a cliff but instead of jumping found a notebook that changed me. For taped to the back of the second to last page in that little black moleskine, where it would not be discovered until the reading was nearly complete, I found a gift. A folded cashier’s check for twenty thousand dollars. Made out to cash. In the memo, Grow Big and Start Something New.

It’s been a year since I found the story and the gift. A year of long hard crushing looks inside my array of festering aches, examining the shadowy places, unearthing the dark bits, the crippling bitterness, the roots of my unwanted causes.

I did as the memo said and started something new with the money, a fresh way of living and coexisting, taking on chunks of frustrating responsibility and making what I can of what is, at its heart, a beautiful life in an extraordinary world. I started a business speaking to others and it has thrived.

I want you to thrive. At the end of this journal, you will find a small key and a location to a locker that has everything you need to start something new. Consider this an investment in your heart.

For the heart has something that the mind can never replicate. An opportunity in weakness that I never saw. For the greater the pain, the greater the ability to connect with others in pain.

We live in a world that can hurt us deeply and lastingly, but broken souls can heal each other.

December 25, 2019

You cannot properly judge anyone by their worst mistake, or you will only see the dark in all of us.

The black spots on our souls require distinct and humble accountability and correction, but the bright selfless beautiful moments are the times that define, and the gifts we leave behind…