On Quitting: Life and Love
Part one of a series of essays on the blessings and curses of resisting a world of control, compliance, and compulsion.
Readers,
I know a lot of us are psychically and spiritually exhausted by the relentless ripsaw tide between revelation and disillusionment erupting daily as we choke on the continuing gaslight pumped into the atmosphere to obscure the avarice and murderous hypocrisies flowing from the world’s thrones of power. I certainly am. It’s a lot to bear.
It’s all so blatant now.
Moral injury hunts and haunts us all. If you are seeking some kind of refuge, I get it. Disassociation and denial is how humans deal with extreme stress and trauma. Most of us are also in perpetual survival mode, chained to the nonstop treadmill of modernity, where stumbling is injurious and stopping means certain doom.
There’s no shame. We can only bear so much.
However, if you have read me for long you know already that I deal in blood and guts. Sometimes I suffer a fit of gallows humor or delve into comedic retellings of personal folly and family disfunction, but mostly it’s the blood and the guts.
I believe in courtesy and diplomacy, but not in sacrifice of the real. I don’t write to coddle or pander. I bleed and feel freely. I need to. I want you see it. I do it out of necessity, and grave concern. I care about humanity. I care about the planet. It’s all entwined and we are blind, blind, blind.
I want to break the spell.
My code: Deny shame and vanity fertile ground. Reject the shallow and trivial and performative. Resist laundering our Machiavellian reality. Dig where we bury our secrets and demons and pain. Endeavor to show more and tell less, because everybody is selling a fucking opinion on the internet.
My words can be brutal, but they won’t betray you. Too few offer to show us their frailties and wounds as witness to the mad and ravenous world we’ve been born into.
May the truth avail us. No matter how sharp.
—C
It’s great to be able to stop When you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong, And be able to do something else instead And think this song: I can stop when I want to Can stop when I wish I can stop, stop, stop any time. And what a good feeling to feel like this And know that the feeling is really mine. Know that there’s something deep inside That helps us become what we can.
—Fred Rodgers
About a month ago I dreamt I died.
In the dream I’m in my apartment and I start feeling dizzy. The lightheadedness grips me swift, intensifying beyond my ability to react and I fall to my knees. And then the keen edge of acknowledgment cuts: I’m dying. There is no pain but my fading mind accuses, heart attack.
As my vision dims and body falls face down prone I think, I am alone. Who will know?
This is one of the many fears of the companionless. Where is my keeper?
Instead of jerking awake in sheer panic, I was calm and deeply relieved. But I lay awake in bed for some time thinking about it, about how quickly, unannounced, and unprovoked death had come for me. There would be no denial, no bargaining, no medical Hail Marys, or slow romantic exits. It was a fierce humbling.
Death and I are already aquatinted beyond the inevitable cosmic sense. I knocked at its door a few times in my early adulthood. But each time death answered the door, it turned me away. It just wasn’t time, even as I conspired to make it so somewhere between active and passive intent.
Not to mention, we live in an age where they can bring you back from grievous fates that would otherwise guarantee passage over death’s welcome mat. Which is a terrifying prospect itself. I can tell you from repeated experience, the path back from near-death is a harrowing trial of pain and missing time and hallucinations and inability to communicate.
Agency is thin.
And what of the quality of existence if you’re pulled back from the that final gate? In what state will the body and mind be? That’s why I sometimes say, the only thing worse than dying is not dying.
Don’t mistake these thoughts as slander against the miracle of life. It’s precious. Sacred. But playing god has nightmare consequences. Eventually the sacrifices required are too high and living becomes a mockery, blasphemous of both life and death. The ghosts of such behavior haunt our days, numbering in finitude the continuance of our ways.
I am writing of these uncomfortable experiences and thoughts because something else was happening when I was dreaming of dying. An old friend was actually dying.
I didn’t know about his passing until the next morning when I got a text from another (mutual) friend that included the above screenshot. It’s a Facebook post from James’ wife.
I resist reading too much into the synchronicity, but it is spooky.
I’ve written a little about James before, about how we were close friends during high school and for a few years after, but our relationship soured because we were preoccupied with being destructive assholes during the later half of our friendship. Unsurprisingly, that eventually lead to being assholes to each other.
Betrayal is both weapon and wound.
The death throes of our friendship coincided and intertwined with my repeated meetings with death itself. It was an emotionally painful and physically destructive time, but the short of it was I chose life and a different path and never spoke to James again.
The friend who sent me the screenshot announcing James’ death is the same friend who informed me that James had attempted suicide in an emotional phone call back in 2022. James had shot himself in the head, the destruction traveling through the roof of his mouth, destroying his sinuses and blinding an eye, before rocketing through his brain.
He would have died but his mother-in-law showed up and cleared his airway of pooling blood. You see, she’s a nurse and James’ autonomic functions kept purring despite his catastrophic injury. Then surgeons and medical technology did what they do and yanked James back to the living, though only as a shade of his former self. One that could never be released from a long-term care facility.
I quit trying to die and 32 years later James quit trying to live. Both of us were brought back. His bonus round was not as lucky nor as long as mine.
Rest in peace, James.
What does it mean to give up hunting for love?
I feel like a key to no locks.
I’ve lived long enough to know that love is not the myth culture sells us. It’s stained with legacies of dysfunction, control, and coercion. It has made me wary, of others, and myself when it comes to desire.
This understanding has been hard-won, after a great deal of wounding and warping and the searing grief of failure. Introspection has, and continues to be a key role in the process.
When you’re poor, the mirror is your therapist, if you dare.
God, what a torture it is to ache for such an essential human quality but also understand that it comes at the cost of vulnerability to deep pain and cultural corruption. How many wounds can a heart bear? Is there no end to it? It has made me vigilantly protective.
And how can initial attraction be both shallow and disproportionately powerful and influenced by so many forces and structures, internal and external? Humans are fucking complicated. They bring their histories and patterns, needs and desires, wherever they go.
In some ways I’m a completely standard variety man, and in others, completely outside the bounds. A dread unicorn. I’m hard to fit and size. Some of my shape is self-hewn, and some is the tectonics of trauma. When it comes to romantic love, I fear others interpret this as being “picky” or “unrealistic” or lost in aloofness.
“Damaged goods”.
I just want to fucking feel something equally shared and true, not forced or faked. And to not cave to the pressures of our bullshit culture, playing out cardboard roles while chasing status and image. Is that asking too much?
I worry that the answer is yes. I also worry that instead I am the problem.
My intuition has never failed me, though I have historically ignored it. The relationships I’ve had have all felt “off”, but I repressed it. Denied it.
I respect my intuition and take relationships very serious now. Everyone deserves that. Always.
This has meant a solitary life for a really long time. I sure hope its not permanent.
All to say that I never found another heart where there was an equally strong initial attraction and availability for intimacy, let alone one where my heart feels genuinely safe and accepted, where trust and honesty are the foundation. This is probably because we find it hard to be that way with ourselves. I certainly have failed in that regard in the past.
The masses are on a goddamn mission in the most shallow of terms when it comes to love. To put faith in a personal code and to let go of outcomes in this world is heresy. Nevertheless, I have. What does it mean to choose to be found over seeking? Hunting? To be open but not manipulative, controlling? This world doesn’t place value in being passive. It’s demeaned. Ridiculed.
The message is that the wanting is what’s sacred. Desires must be taken. Seized. Honesty and trust die on the vine. Cowardice and insincerity thrive.
Especially if you are male, which is acutely problematic. Though women are not immune to the same afflictions. This breeds even more layers of contradiction and paradox. All of it is exhausting to continuously navigate.
I’ve always enjoyed the company of women. I respect their perspectives and knowledge. You can probably thank my mother for that, but also being born a sensitive male, I’ve found some refuge from the brute realities of the world in female friendships, too. My best friend when I was young was a girl.
You can also probably inversely thank my mother for my state and shape which came in the form of a critical betrayal of my trust, which I have previously written about directly and obliquely. My childhood ability to discern her undercurrents was lost on me until well into adulthood.
So it needs to be said that while serially oppressed, women aren’t the angelic opposite of men. Our gender relations are far too complicated and enmeshed for demonized or lionized explanations of behavior. It all goes back to the itch for power. Men made it their attack surface, and we all suffer for it.
I can say that I love my mother deeply and dearly and also acknowledge that I’ve been wounded by her as well. My father didn’t even need to be present to do damage. Other men were present and lurking to play out trauma’s scripts, taking their pound of flesh.
My yin and yang have been an oppositional embattlement most of my life as a result.
I remember my more wolf-like male friends loved to bring me on their teenaged hunts as an unsuspecting Trojan front—a non-threatening male who could talk to and entertain the girls until the alcohol kicked in. My mother’s instruction and trauma’s ghost meant I was far too respectful, scared, and protective to try to force myself on any girl, no matter how much my hormones burned.
I never dated.
Once I figured out the game they were playing, I resented my pillager friends and their exploits. I was also envious. I could not be like them, though part of me wished to be as cavalier and selfish.
I was a chubby teen, and smart enough to be considered a nerd, so I wasn't very desirable or popular in high school. That changed my senior year after a near-fatal motorcycle accident. My weight dropped from 185 to 133 pounds in just a couple of weeks. When I was well enough to return to school, my new appearance gained attention I had never experienced. I was also a celebrity of sorts from all the hearsay that traveled around school while I was gone. I was The Kid Who Cheated Death.
I had new social currency and I liked it.
But I wasn’t used to women throwing themselves at me and didn’t know what to do with it. I still had terror in my veins. I still didn’t date. I would be a virgin until I was 19.
There would be some sexual follies over the coming years, but they were few and brief. I didn't own a car so dating remained mostly undiscovered country. I was more focused on self-destruction anyway.
One of those sexual experiences was with my best friend’s then-wife. We all shared an apartment together, but my collaboration in cheating happened after I moved back to my mother’s house after almost dying again. He had cheated on her previously, and with my shared resentment of his betrayal, she laid a brutal act of revenge.
I had an unsaid crush on his wife, and she probably noticed. Every once in a while, she’d comment on how much she liked how I behaved as a man. She passively flirted with these compliments, openly. But between my friend’s cheating and my almost dying yet again, things went to the next level.
I felt terrible about the affair after the fact and confessed to him with her approval. The look on his face. Stabbing him outright would have been more kind. Maybe somewhere inside I hoped his wife would leave him for me. Everyone had got their digs and dues, but it was my best friend’s expression that made me understand the full scope of his wife’s intent.
I was more pawn than I was led to believe. Beware a woman scorned, indeed. They stayed married, per dysfunction’s rules, at least for a while.
Not long before all this, I’d torched another close friendship in judgement over his serial cheating on his longtime girlfriend. I finally let her know what he was doing. He was beside himself, unable to understand why I would do such a thing to him.
(In a predictable twist, they eventually married, and as far as I know are still married. He’s never stopped cheating on her.)
The guilt was quick to eat at me now that I was directly participating in betrayals of the heart. I vowed never to be party of such behavior again, directly or by proxy, for any reason. The fortifications around my heart were reinforced. My moral lens, clarified.
It wouldn’t be much longer until I quit trying to die. I chose sobriety and therapy. I found steady blue collar work and lived by myself. But the curse of self-hate is tenacious. And betrayals, to the self and others, have many forms.
Living on one’s own has always been harmful because it’s antithetical to how humans evolved, but capitalism teaches us that we should, and commands that we must, so we do. The Nineties were a terrible time to try to make the myth a reality. And it’s only worsened since. One income households were already a dying standard in the 80’s. The pressure to have a partner’s income just to survive adds another coercive dimension to finding a mate.
In desperation, we make exceptions. We ignore our hearts even more. Income potential becomes an alluring and prized trait. We are attracted to the shallow. We are reluctant to end relationships that should end. The power of wealth becomes leverage. We even become trapped. So, pretending becomes the norm.
Add the tribulations of self-hate and destructive acts spurred from a foundation of dysfunctional family dynamics and abuse… Hello hot mess of not knowing how to live or love.
Work, being the most consuming factor of my time, meant coworkers were the most likely candidates as love interests. I fell hard for one, but she was ultimately unavailable, despite my courting attempts. Rejection is hard for the chronically wounded, and I grieved more than what was proportionately appropriate.
My embattlements and doubt piled higher.
Then another coworker showed some unsolicited interest. My attraction to her was tenuous. But she checked all the boxes in my new life strategy of Fake It Till You Make It. She wasn’t in any way intimidating or challenging. Her emotions were metronome steady. She was kind. My mother didn’t like her.
We lived together for three years, her occasionally hinting at marriage.
I was reluctant. At one point I told her I wanted to break up. She wouldn’t have it and within a week, I caved.
But the tell I really should have paid attention to was her very public disappointment that I didn’t give her a diamond ring when we got engaged. I’d spent hours, days, designing matching custom rings to be constructed, including her in the process. We’d already bought a home together. It wasn’t enough.
I cried alone one day while listening to a Sting song the week before we our wedding. A part of me was trying to be heard but I shoved that voice down deep into the dark. I was on a mission. I betrayed both of us and married her anyway.
Thirteen years later, all doubts and denial that my love was an elaborate construction evaporated. To her credit, she was the one to draw a line. “Do you want to be married or not?” She demanded. She wanted the marriage and all the trinkets that came with it. I sat quietly on the couch for some time choking on guilt and shame. Then I finally spoke truth. “No.”
The look on her face. “You never loved me,” she said bitterly.
She was right, mostly. I’d lied to both of us.
There were good years, and I always treated her well. I didn’t lie. I didn’t cheat. I didn’t covet. We had a son after a wicked struggle with infertility. I stood strong by her and our son when he was diagnosed with T1 diabetes. But all the while I was pretending. Protecting my heart. Caught in the flow of the crowd and the script.
And now our child would suffer for my cowardice.
What’s those Talking Heads lyrics?
You may ask yourself, "What is that beautiful house?" You may ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?" And you may ask yourself, "Am I right? Am I wrong?" And you may say to yourself, "My God! What have I done?"
I’ve never felt so rotten, so ruinous, even compared to those times when the deadly transgressions were against myself.
I will say, it felt good to speak truth. A heavy burden was lifted. But the high was fleeting. Now it was time to wade through the wreckage and salvage what I could. Much was sacrificed. What tormented me the most was the lost time with my son. Was I going to become my father? No, abandonment would have been the end of me. I tried to savor my time with him as much as possible and not let guilt cloud our relationship.
It was tough. It still is, and he’s an adult now.
It was also time to do some really dumb stunts with romantic love. Social media and dating sites were blooming. The internet allowed for long distance mirages. I had plenty of ammo for regret. The longest relationship only lasted six months.
For around seven years I fumbled and flailed. I rejected and was rejected. Lots of it were public. Intimacy was scarce. Yes, there was sex, but not much. Definitely less than I wanted. I even tried the openly casual route. Nope, not for me.
It did it all with a fool’s integrity, but man, there was plenty of guilt and cringe moments. The spinning of wheels. My heart tapped out.
The Trump years were unfolding and a lot of people’s true character surfaced. Acquaintances and family turned ugly. My ex-wife picked a couple of Trump fanatics to romance. She’s still with one of them, and has embraced the toxic politics herself.
I don’t carry as much guilt for the failed marriage anymore.
It all started to become ridiculously strange and I quit the scene. No more social media. No more dating apps. No more trying to date. It was time to reassess what all these things meant, what they were becoming, and what I was doing with them.
Then COVID-19 hit. Holy shit.
So began my life as a cave-dwelling mountaintop monk with an achey heart.
My age and financial status worry me. I’m not young anymore and poverty is isolating. I’m feeling the alienation of discriminatory clichés and undesirable status more than ever. The relationship I hope for remains a mystery.
The seas keep getting rougher. It’s increasingly difficult to go it alone. It continually challenges me to let go, to just let things happen of their own accord. But agendas are exhausting and pretenses, hollow. I am who I am. What will be, will be.
Is it enough to be a good human? I wonder.
Along this theme, here’s the opening poem from my debut collection. It has been edited from the published version.
Unexpected
I’d tell you that my heart is feral Only unexpected love will find it in the open And even if it dashed into the brush You’d still know it existed I’d tell you that love does not reside in a list of qualities Not a product summoned out of sheer will Love has nothing to do with tradition Or etiquette I’d tell you that part of me is lonesome That it makes me wary of my intent That the absence of touch Creates a subtle despair I’d tell you that I’m not always my own best company That my insides have known brutal war But now there is a fragile peace That sometimes flakes at the edges I’d tell you sadness lurks behind my smile That laughter is the cure The humor in the shadows is me Playing in the dark I’d tell you I’ve come to accept my skull’s contents That the folds are painted with strokes Black and blue that will never fade Truth that I need not evade I’d tell you I've chosen to be lost That I’ve wandered Off the paved road Beyond the manicured landscape I’d tell you I don’t know if that was a good idea That I’m not sure I can navigate Like Monarchs Or Starlings I’d tell you I feel vulnerable That my heart beats outside my chest As a precious son And words on a page I’d tell you that following dreams is a frightening act I’d tell you I’m glad you breathe My shoulders lighter when you speak If we met today If our eyes met with the same intensity If our smiles were as eager I would say, “hello”
Your admissions of culpability without excuse, bravely exposing your flaws and wounds with evolved frankness, all reasons I admire you and your words.