Who Am I?

A friend gave me an assignment, to write in 500 words who I am. I have this bad habit of doing things beautiful women ask me to do, but I don’t think I can do this. For one thing, as anyone who has read much of the rest of my blog, I can’t hardly write my name in 500 words. Not really, of course, but I think I used more than 100 words to say here’s a story by someone else for Halloween, and hello my name is 89.

But that’s not why I can’t do it. I can’t because I don’t know how to say who I am, how to define it. I don’t know who I am. I think about a country song I love that centers on the subject, but the song is wrong, none of those are WHO she is as much as what she is or what she does or, even more dangerous, what she’s done.

I know those things. I am the oldest son of a preacher-man, and yes, I love that song as well. I look more like my mother, for those who don’t believe that, they should see pictures of both of us at age 17. I am a middle-aged man with the spirit and mind of a man in his late twenties. I am an artist, a photographer, a writer. I am a good friend who knows how too listen, be honest, and put the needs of others above himself. I am a selfish man who wants and wants and wants for himself and never seems to know just how to achieve any of those desires. I am a therapist and counselor. A guardian and caretaker. I am a father with no children. A social butterfly who isolates. A man who can openly and honestly pour his soul out on paper making his heart an open book for the whole world to read who still feels that few know him and fewer still understand. Obviously, I am a man who slips too easily into the abyss of self-pity.

I am a mean who feeds and lives on the dream of the fairy-tale, the dream. Someday my prince or princess will come. I want the partner I can love in all the deep, crazy, wonderful ways the unrealistic romantics believe defines love. I want the wonderful, amazing, intelligent, strong-willed, straight-talking, beautiful person to love. That part’s not hard to find. But oops, have to complicate things, I want her to love me back. Ah, and there lies the rub. Because I am a man who knows I don’t deserve her. Because while I have much, and I do believe that, to give…I am kind, want the best for the people I love even if that means I don’t get what I want (or need) sometimes, understanding, generous, unselfish in matters of the heart and bed, and more (like not being a controlling beast)….the scales have to be weighed, does the above good (listed and not) outweigh the bad, the baggage that I bring to the relationship that any partner of mine would be instantly stuck with like a bad tattoo? That above list is not who I am, it’s how I behave, who I am is a man who doesn’t believe that measure up in great enough quantities to override what I’ve done, which is also, for those paying attention, not who I am.

I am a man who has had only one relationship in a lifetime where he has not cheated, and the one only lasted a couple of months. Do I believe I can be faithful? Yes, but actions speak louder than words, so…I am an alcoholic and an addict. Sure I’ve been clean and sober for over 10 months now, but I lived in that bondage for over 25 years. Those 10 months aren’t enough for me to feel confident to use the word recovered rather than recovering. I almost through it all away a week ago. I am a divorcee, for any who don’t understand how that relates to the first two parts of this paragraph, please stop reading now, you’re wasting both our time. During what may be one of the most darkest and destructive periods of my drinking, drugging, cheating career I made a choice, a mistake, said yes to the wrong girl (quick side note of warning to guys reading this, just because a bouncer let a woman in the club, doesn’t necessarily mean she’s a woman or of age). So I am a felon as well, and one who has to register so one who can’t pretend he’s not. What a wonderful thing to saddle someone you love with. I am a man who has way too many psycho-exes and one-night stands littering his past. It says something about how I treat myself and the partners I choose more than the partner I want does.

I can not support myself much less others, going further in debt every month. Living on plastic, perhaps that has become the American Dream. I own little and less that I acquired on my own.

Some of that I can not change, and I must accept that. But just because I have to accept it, doesn’t mean someone else should have to. What I can change, I am trying to. I have had less romantic or sexual partners this year than I did in any ten month period since puberty, including the time spent in a cage. I have mostly eliminated the psycho factor from my life, and haven’t slept with any in months. I am starting a business which has the potential to eventually support me and others in my life. Today will be one more day further along the path of recovery and 24 more hours of time to add to the total of clean and sober. Tomorrow, will be another. I dare not count on more than that, and yet, I look forward to my one-year birthday in December. I am a man who is finally growing up, who is cleaning up the wreckage of his past to the best of his ability, who is changing for the better slowly enough to make sure the changes are real and lasting. And yet I am still a man who believes that any person I could love and respect enough to totally give myself to, any person worthy of the man I am have become and am becoming, is too good for the baggage that comes with me. And the reverse, that any person I could care about so little as to ask them to share in the life I has as a result of my own destructive choices, well, that is a person who most often tends to turn out to fall into the psycho category I mentioned before. My picker is not broken. I pick the best. I always have. And then when I dare not unleash the hurricane of my life upon them, I walk away into the night with the easy, crazy, and broken like me. There’s been one exception to that, and I nearly destroyed her. That simple fact makes it that harder to let go of the idea that I am unworthy of the sane, relatively healthy, smart, beautiful people that fall into fairy-tale status.

So who am I? I am an insecure egomaniac. A narcissist who hates himself. I am a man who sees the good in him that others say is there…and never believes it is enough to outweigh the bad. I am a man who aches for the fairy-tale he doesn’t truly believe exists for himself. A man who helps others, because that’s what those few good qualities enable him to do, but who doesn’t have a clue how to help himself. A man who’s growing and changing and becoming a better man and is not one inch further from the wreckage of the past as he was a year ago. And like the ruins of the coliseum, some wreckage simply can not be cleaned up, must be lived with in plain sight every day. I am a mass of contradictions, a self-pitying, whining fool who hates self-pity and whining. Who am I? I don’t know. And I am not sure I really want to find out, because the what I am and what I’ve done and what is on the surface as a result of who I am, whoever that is, scares me enough.