Imaginary Dragons, or Shadow Boxing and the ego.
Younger brother cousin, same father and out mothers are sisters.
The thing about being just smart enough to live in your head is that you isolate and insulate from feelings. Or at least that’s been my approach.
This past month I was offered a chance to look at my demons from a different angle.
Dennis Jr is kin. Blood family. My father married my mother and had two children. He then decided to pursue my mother’s sister. Somewhere in this process my mother tried to trap him, entice him, convince him to stay by becoming pregnant with me. That didn’t pan out and he proceeded with the divorce from her and within a short time marriage to her younger sister.
It’s a lot of back story to set the scene for a man with lots of shared genes yet very little common experiences, or so I thought.
Bitterness can cause enormous barriers. We grew up within 50 miles of each other yet lived without seeing much of each other.
Years passed and we connected while going to university in Las Vegas. For a few short months we interacted fairly regularly and had started to bridge some of the gap caused by two jilted sisters.
I moved from Vegas and the distance created an opportunity to drift. Which we did.
Years pass so quickly and it wasn’t until his year that I felt a desire to reconnect. I have avoided the valley I grew up in like the plague for a number of reasons.
Part of my journey is to understand myself and my choices better so I made the pilgrimage back home.
I connected with Den and we set up a meeting for lunch.
When I’m approaching a significantly emotionally charged event in my life I have a tendency to run or find an excuse to change plans last minute. I fought this and we met. Over the next couple of hours i had the chance to see this guy whom I’d envied and been quite convinced he’d gotten the better end of the deal, open up and share his life with me. His gut level, drivers seat perspective.
I like words. I enjoy expression in written form and yet neither really convey just how much this experience shook my foundation.
Decades of rage and sadness came to the surface and left me in moments. Waves of sadness, of mental and emotional pain moved through me in an expression of tears, body flush, and then laughter.
Den had seen my life from the outside and his view of my experience. His envy of the freedom I had were as far from reality as mine were of his.
When we fight with our demons in the dark we make no progress.
A couple of weeks have passed and I’m still filling the empty place left from years of sorrow and rage.