Breathing Room

It's been almost three months since my last blog entry and it took the death of an actor to prompt me to write back in February.  And recently, my writing creativity has been so stifled that I almost took the blog down completely.  Thankfully, a few people have commented on it in the past few weeks and, due to good timing, I suppose I'll leave it up.  But what to write about?

When I started blogging, I did it with the promise that I would share everything... call it personal accountability.  If something was happening in my life, I would display it publicly for my friends and family to see.  In that way, there was nowhere to hide from my issues.  I had to tackle them head-on.  And once they were in the open, they didn't seem as severe as they did when I was holding them close to the chest.

Lately, though, I've run into an interesting issue.  Since last September / October (as I previously blogged), I've been on a medicine regimen that's been working wonders.  Eight months after my introduction to 'wonder' drug Clozaril, I'm seeing and coping with the world in very different ways.  There have been ups and downs, surely, but things that seemed like issues or stressors in the past simply... aren't anymore.  Stressors, especially in my daily routine, have melted away to nothingness or, better, have been turned to positives in ways that I wouldn't have thought before.  I feel that I have been approaching daily life differently and it has been reciprocating in kind.

But that leaves me with the larger issues, deep rooted therapy type issues, that I still haven't worked my way up to sharing.  Those are the things that are either a) written in a journal, b) shared within the confines of my therapist's four walls, or c) written in, what will be, a poor attempt at a book.  A) and b) are easy to understand - unless I give the immediate go-ahead, they will never ever be shared.  C) however... whether you like the idea or not, I've had a lot of people ask me to put my writing efforts into the form of a book.  I suppose it makes sense.  If I can blog, then I can put it all together and find an agent.  And I can share deeper issues in a "book" because the immediacy of sharing publicly isn't there.  Who knows when a book might be published... five years, ten years?  Who cares?  I can share it and then forget it.

Anyway, as an example of an immediate issue to share that I'd rather not share (mind blown)... I was sitting with my son after breakfast one morning, not long ago.  We were watching Curious George, part of our usual routine.  He looked at me, smiled, and said, "Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be..."

NononononononoNONONONO!  DON'T SAY IT!  That's what went through my head.  My stomach fell to the floor and I think my heart even stopped.  My ego, overpowering all, finished his sentence for him... "Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be..."  "...just like you."

Except, that's not what happened.  At all.  With a smile still on his face, my son finished, "...a fireman."

"Daddy, when I grow up, I want to be a fireman."

Quite frankly, this is embarrassing to write and, if you were looking at me now, I'm sure I'd be red.  It reeks of the inadequacies that I have as a father and, also, the problems that I have with my own dads.  I'm not burrowing my head in the sand.  I AM tackling these, but in the same way that most of us do - Privately.

So, I guess to say that I don't have topics to write about is untrue.  I have pages upon pages of topics alone to put to paper.  They're just a little deeper than those topics I've written about in the past.  To the reader, maybe the example above doesn't seem much different than the items I've chosen to write about in the past, but to me it seems much more visceral than what I've exposed before.  Yet, who knows... maybe after review of a few entries, I'll realize that it's all just the same old crap and I won't be as self-conscious as I feel now.  Or maybe I simply need a breather.