Leaving Portland today, have had a good stay. I have made it to the gym for the last seven days and hope to continue that in New York, then plan on joining a gym in Santa Cruz. I ended up dropping down to 184 while in California, am making up for it in Portland. My parents took me out for a Birthday dinner last night and I could not finish my 12 oz Ribeye - kind of embarrassing. I figure with Fall coming, it’s time to slow bulk (with gym time).
Peace out.
Hoping this is not as final as it sounds.
But absolutely be embarrassed by that lack of follow-through on the ribeye!
Lol - just a phrase.
Have to work on my eating game for sure. It was my 60th Birthday.
Happy 60th, man! Remember if you don’t eat your meat…you won’t get any pudding!
Welp, I continue to cold plunge in the river, eat very little, do pushups, sit ups, leg raises, vacuums, and I have added in curls, shrugs, lateral raises with empty milk gallons that I filled with water.
Almond milk, lol.
I have also ripped out carpet in two bedrooms and replaced it with carpet tiles, astro-turf like stuff, and two thirds of the living room.
Sounds simple, but I am not so bright. Pull the carpet, then the tack strips, then spend days ripping out staples - sweep and mop and put the tiles in.
I am almost done and it feels good - has only taken me two months, lol.
My woodstove took a dump so I am working on getting that replaced. Not a big deal because it is still reasonably warm in Santa Cruz, but have some cold days coming.
I bought an oil filled radiator in the meantime in case it does get cold. Not ideal, but hey, living rent free.
Been committed to getting abs so do ab work with weight when I am in Portland or NY and have gym access - doing sit-ups with a gallon of water on my chest in Santa Cruz. Oddly enough, seeing some progress.
Obvs, riding the bike a lot - about forty miles a week. Not crazy, just transportation, but I think it is helping get lean.
Just bought tix to NY in October to watch my son play in a band festival, woot woot. Will also take him down to see his sister (my daughter) at UDel over the weekend and maybe get an official tour. UDel is his fall back school, but he really likes it. He is either going to be an Physicist or play in a garage band.
I talk to him about drugs, and he tells me, “I’m not sure about creatine so I’m not sure why you are talking to me about coke.”
He wrassles (sort of), but am pretty sure he will end up teaching music despite his other academic skills.
Thinking 185 at 14% (relative) is a good goal, but will be bulking when I have gym access.
Peace!
Went to NY on 10/16 to watch my kid play in the Newsday band competition. He plays the trumpet. It was very cool. He’s excited about playing Bugler’s Holiday for the Christmas concert. Total nerd.
He has now collected a Fender electric guitar, a Fender bass guitar, a Yamaha acoustic, an ocarina, a harmonica, a Jew’s harp, and a ukulele. But he thinks he wants to do Engineering while he is taking guitar lessons, AP Music Theory and playing in the band.
I left California on 10/16 at 185 pounds and about 16% body fat. I do not gym while I am in California other than sit-ups, pushups, and some other barbell exercises I do with milk gallons - about eight pounds.
While in NY and Portland, I ate well and gymmed well. I arrived back in Cali a few days ago and weighed in at 192 and 15.6% body fat.
Successful trip methinks.
Back in Santa Cruz. I started posting on TikTok two months ago, I know, weird AF. But I figured, what the hay.
I had 98 followers last night so I posted a Tok asking for two more and I lost one.
WTF?
Fun and games!
I used to run the Country Club my brother owns. I know that sounds boushie AF, but it is really just a ghetto golf club.
We had a marketing company manage our website and social media. My chef had a problem with them, but my brother loved my chef, so after I quit, they fired the marketing company,
It is now almost eighteen months later and I still have control of social marketing. I asked my brother over a year ago to get me off of it, then asked the marketing company, but they had been fired.
Now there is a really dumb girl running it, and I asked her to take me off of it. I mean, I have total control of FB, Instagram, and Twitter.
I sent her an email asking her to take me off and she is arguing with me. I mean, seriously, I can post anything.
How dumb is she?
How dumb is my brother?
I figured out how to remove myself from the social media pages but am holding up my brother for money or title to my truck - I bought it from him two years ago but never received the title.
I am being a total dick and it feels good.
Off to NY tomorrow/today, see my kids. My son is playing a trumpet for the Winter Concert - they are playing Bugler’s Holiday. Three trumpets. It’s pretty cool.
My son tells me he has to learn a new breathing pattern due to the pace of the music - in breath with out breath at the same time.
Ironic. When he was younger, he had speech therapy because his tongue wasn’t working right. He lisped. We spent two years in therapy with him, and now he is playing Bugler’s Holiday.
Good times.
I dunno if its still pertinent, but I worked out a lot of problems exactly like this.
Still pertinent. Been up and down but seem to be settling into a routine now.
Hang in there bud. Happy New Year!
Weird. I’ve been paying the mortgage for the last five years, about 2500. I told my wife tonight I can’t pay it anymore and she was like, Okay.
Wonder why I have been paying it if it was that easy.
I had some interaction on the Hot Takes thread and figured I would respond to @EmilyQ , @SkyzykS, and @jshaving here rather than puking all over that thread.
I feel a little more open here, as hard as that is to believe, because anyone following this thread is more familiar with the path I am traveling.
Great pick up by all of you in terms of the change in tone of my posts. It’s difficult to explain, but I have stopped caring how others perceive me. Sometimes that manifests as anger (working on that) but for me, it’s a manifestation of my shift to not caring how I am perceived by others, stepping into my authentic/true self.
Paradoxically, that shift is new to me and often I offend others when I am really trying to connect, to help, to be supportive. While I have a few challenges, emotional regulation is one of them.
I tagged @emilyQ because she feels maternal to me and reminds me of counselors I have had that actually care about me (I have many others that don’t). @SkyzykS because he has walked a similar path and has been so supportive. @Jshaving because he is wise beyond his years and has familiarity with my challenges.
Recovery is about recovering, rediscovering, your true and authentic self. I am a seeker. I am searching for answers, for the root of my issues, and not just to be abstinent.
I appreciate you guys not seeing me as just angry, or an internet troll, and inquiring about my well being.
Hopefully this post will put you all at ease a bit regarding my journey. For my regular peeps, both of you, you already get it.
Rumi wrote, I paraphrase, the wound is the gift.
I am still trying to figure out how it is a gift.
Spiritual burden. They remind us to ask god (of our understanding) for help and strength, ultimately the burden is a gift, as it becomes our conduit to a higher power.
At least thats my understanding and application of it.
Also, Glad to hear you aren’t just hanging out in a comfort zone. The dark icky parts are where the healing happens.
Thank you for responding.
I don’t think the addiction is the wound. I am not sure about you, but I view addiction as a symptom, and I suspect we are all on the spectrum of addiction.
I do believe in this. As someone that has coped with life in a manner unacceptable to society (addiction), I do think it forces us to find a higher power. Frankly, something I have been searching for. But I don’t see the burden as the wound, nor do I see it as a gift.
I had a therapist tell me that I should thank god for alcohol and drugs. She is an Internal Family Parts practitioner, which can be a bit wacky, but her point was that a part of me used alcohol to heal the wounded child. That part was a firefighter. Alcohol and drugs were the water to put out the fire.
If water didn’t work, well, you can guess what the next method was.
So I should be grateful for alcohol and drugs because they kept me alive long enough to recognize I could make other choices.
Obvs, I overthink things.
Yeah. For me its a manifestation of the inner turmoil. The next layer back is pain, fear, untreated trauma, and emotional malnourishment. I did the drugs & drinking to assuage the pain, quiet the demons. Just ended up with rowdy drunken demons!
My last therapist retired (i connected with and see another from that practice now) but in our sessions we did discuss this. He actually dropped the veil a few times and just spoke directly in admiration of the fact that I never offed myself, becuase to put it bluntly- a lot of people who only experienced one of the several successive traumas I had took their own lives.
I just, 
. I dunno. It just isn’t an option. Never has been.
I do believe that when I used and why I used was to cope, and with no other options that might have been. So, between my own personal experience and his professional and personal experience- I give that theory a lot of credence.
An aside- What a timely topic. Between that last post and this one, I just spent 2½ hours on the phone with my one niece, as she’s hitting a bottom of her own and needed someone to talk to, and some encouragement to make the change. I’m just glad I can be around to help instead of one of the ones that hurts.
Lifes nuts. I’ve gone from the family drugs/violence/drunk to family’s addiction counselor (unofficial, of course).
Maybe we did stick around for a reason.
I am staying in the Santa Cruz mountains, in a small cabin with a woodstove as the only source of heat. I am up to feed the fire and while I wait for it to take, I read your response and wanted to respond.
This.
I grew up in a cool home, good parents. I was the third of three in 39 months, my parents were done. I was the sensitive kid and the brothers pounded on me. My middle brother figured it out by the time he was nine and stopped, my oldest brother never stopped until I popped him in the dining room.
Then the physical abuse shifted to mental abuse.
Yep, that was the gist of the conversation with my therapist. Alcohol and drugs served as the bridge for me to get space to get healthy. They saved my life.
I wonder if you have identified the wound. I seem to have so many that I am not sure which is the root.
If you believe in Universe, this is good enough.
Personally, I think there is something bigger for us. I have learned that trauma causes not just PTSD, cPTSD, but also ADHD (Gabor Mate - I am sure that @EmilyQ will question me on that so I included Mate).
I truly believe that we have more to give. It is not just twelfth step, paying it forward. I think we are the canaries.
We will see.
Thank you for the tag. Yes, I was worried.
I don’t personally see trauma as causing ADHD, but rather I see anxiety and easy overwhelm/flooding as causing ADHD-like symptoms. So the solution when I encounter it will be calming strategies, deep breaths and grounding and such, rather than the organizational strategies ADHD needs. I mean, maybe both, obvs. But first calming, then sorting through what needs to be done.
Having sort of observed your journey all these years, I would offer only that I think you should work on your locus of control if possible - a shift from externalizing blame/fault/problem to internalizing with a focus on forgiveness and wellbeing. (In my view, forgiveness is wellbeing.)
Eleanor Roosevelt said - and this is my current favorite quote - that “no one can be made to feel inferior without their consent.” I think any feeling can be subbed out for inferior. Guilty, responsible, foolish, angry, etc.
My older brother brutalized me. An early memory is of him hitting me in the face with a Tonka truck. It was accidental, but if I was old enough to be standing near him and remember it vividly, so 3 or 4, he would have been 6 or 7 and well able to have used better judgment. But we’ll go with “accident,” because benefit of the doubt is the kind of person I want to be and we really don’t know. I don’t think the pillow over my face years later was an accident, though, nor all the kicks to the stomach over the years as I lay on the floor in the fetal position guarding my head. I recall sitting in my room, holding the lock on my door after my parents stopped having babysitters while my brother raged on the other side of it, kicking and throwing himself into it. I was 9 when we moved to the house where the babysitting stopped. It occurred to me eventually to tape the lock so he couldn’t pick it, which made things much better - I could read until my father came home. I was 12 when we moved to the house where he played at suffocating me, so he was 15. The violence never stopped. He pushed an old lady down when he was 17 to steal her purse and somehow wound up in the military, so relief from it came for me at 14. My brother was 6’4" as an adult. A big guy. I’m 5’6.5" as an adult, and until very recently slender. He was 3 years older than me, so a massive size differential.
But he suffered, too. My brother’s impulse control disorder and whatever the fuck else was going on prevented him having a decent life. Addiction, jail (prison maybe? I don’t actually know), no family. Just pain.
Sympathy for him doesn’t make me not-sad that he hurt me the way he did, it just makes me not-angry as a primary response.
It is not in my best interest to remain angry at him or the parents who allowed it to happen. My mother got sick of the entire shit show when I was 12 and decided to go find herself with her new lesbian partner hundreds of miles away. It sucked, and is a primary core wound for me. I have MASSIVE abandonment issues.
But it is in my best interest to focus on my mother’s positive contribution to my development in addition to her abdication of duty. Because I want to feel good! I want to nurture contentment in myself, joy, delight.
I, too, have an ex. In addition to being an increasingly shit husband as the years wore on, he’s been very gaslighting and post-divorce has been a nightmare for the kids I love. Bitterness comes easily for me in his direction. I’m trying very hard to eradicate it. He’s been unable to form another relationship since me, with four months or so being his max. I genuinely wish he’d be able to get someone so he could be happier so my kids could be happier and freer of his unending misery and depression. But he still gaslights me (and thus them) by, for example, telling my teens that “Mom won’t be happy until we’re all on mind-altering drugs,” which has prevented my anxious, sensitive kids being willing to be “weak” and seek help when they’ve needed it. (That’s changing now, so maybe I’ll be able to let it go soon.)
There were good things about him and our marriage and I try for my kids’ sakes and my own to focus on those. For me, though. Not him. I’m trying very hard not to consent to bitterness, because at some point it becomes not something I do to understand and heal my trauma, but the person I am.
“Anger is a brew that does more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” Mark Twain