Just another rainy day

Dear Bloggers,

When it was time to leave after working late hours, I rushed to my car and immediately drove home. On the highway, halfway home, the rain began a heavy downpour. It covered everything on my windshield. The heavy rain made it so hard for me to see anything in the road. My windshield wipers could hardly do the job. The radio played Bruce Springsteen's song Tougher than the rest... I dozed off into memory lane back to my younger days when I was a Teen and Cowboy movies came on television. Smoking and drinking were not seen as bad habits. In my younger days I smoked dark tobacco and yes I rolled my own cigarettes. Furthermore I worked as a bartender in a local club so drinking was a common thing as well. And trying some soft drugs was also part of my youth. Not being afraid of what this could cause to my health as we did not know anything about the risks because there was no education about smoking, drinking only about drugs we knew that the hard stuff like heroin could cause a lot of damage. 

I remember that we got to see the movie Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo the story of the teenager Christiane F. who got addicted to hard drugs. This made me realize that drugs could do more damage than what I was aware of. Still I kept on smoking and drinking for several years as the only thing that changed over the years is that I became a Sailor. And yes we all know how sailors are. Well that picture is wrong I can tell you as the work at sea became in the last decades a more dry environment. In the last years of my career at sea there was zero tolerance policy on the ship and that was simply risking your job when you had to come to the bridge for a breathalyser test. Only smoking was a hard to stop habit as crew members still could buy cheap smokes. Some steam engines must have been pretty jealous of me. My engine was running for many hours a day.

When I left the ship I was still smoking a lot but as timeshedules became tighter and it became stressful to find breaks to get a smoke. I decided to stop smoking and that was easier said than done. Somehow after a few fails, I succeeded. It is approx. Ten years now that I stopped and I still can enjoy the smell of smokers that are standing outside at the station. No my life did not become boring it just made many changes in a hard way due to my wife falling ill in that same period. It started all on the day when I slipped on the top of the staircase and ended up in hospital and they told me that I've been lucky that didn't break my neck. As my speech was shattered and I wasn't able to speak any of my foreign languages anymore. 

With some hard work of specialists and some dear friends I recovered and after a couple of years I was back on the ship again. Something in my mind had changed and I became a bit of different person and I took life a bit more serious. When I left the life at sea in 2009 I took my time to decide what to do next. I got my driving license for the bus and started the education for commuter buses in the spring of 2010. I still was a smoker but not that heavy as in my sailing days. Drinking I did only on Holidays and free weekends. 

 

And then I was after a few years one of the regular temps that worked for the same company but in a different town. I enjoy still every minute as this job is bringing as much joy as during my days at sea. I love to take the mickey out of people and yes I still give service whenever possible that's just part of who I am. But when the wind is howling around my bus and rain is smashing in my windshield, the old sailor in me is waking up and salty water is running through my vanes. My face is having that special smile towards passengers and comfort them with the feeling not to worry with me at the steering wheel. And yes bad weather on the road is sometimes as tough as bad weather at sea. You only miss the monstrous waves and the challenge of walking in a straight way. Handling the wheel of bus is different kind of discipline but still a challenge to stay on the narrow roads. 

The only thing is when I have to drive home in this kind of weather I am really being homesick and those days at sea will never return as slowly but surely I am reaching the days that I growing older and my kids are becoming the grown ups in this brand new world which didn't become a lot prettier. They have much more to worry about. Probably they could not life their lives like I did. As the heating in the car seat is doing it's job as a lower back pain reliever. I realize that those days are long gone and my trip down memory lane is the only thing that I have left. No one will take these memories from me. Everyday being home is also worth a lot. There will be some nights that I am driving home in severe weather and my heart is crying a little bit for not being a sailor anymore.

Even though the visibility through my windshield was poor due to the heavy rainfall, I still continued to drive, hoping that I didn't get into an accident on the road. I knew as soon as the rain would come down in a more normal way, it will increase my visibility and chances of getting home safe and sound. Just remember that speed isn't anything it's the matter of getting there.

The Old Sailor,

I was thinking about leaving

Dear Bloggers,

As I read through the web for conversations, questions, ideas about depression, I am struck by how many people who write to forums and blogs are desperately asking for help not for their own depression but for that of their spouses, partners, loved ones. So often, they report bewilderment. They feel stunned to find anger and rejection in place of love. How can it be that the person I have known so well is suddenly different, alien, hostile and wants to break out of the relationship that is so precious? 
 

What is this longing to leave that so many depressed people feel? I have no simple answer to that, but I can describe my own tortured experience with an almost irresistible drive to break out and start a new life.
I spent many years feeling deeply unsettled and unhappy in ways I could not understand. Flaring up in anger at my wife and two great young girls became a common occurrence. I’d carry around resentments about being held back and unsatisfied with my life, fantasizing about other places, other women, other lives I could and should be leading. 
 

My usual mode was to bottle up my deepest feelings, making it all the more likely that when they surfaced it would be in weird and destructive ways. I’d seethe with barely suppressed anger, lash out in rage and, of course, deny angrily that anything was wrong when confronted by my wife.

I was often living on the edge, but there were two threads of awareness I could hold onto that restrained me invisibly. One was the inner sense that until I faced and dealt with whatever was boiling inside me, I would only transplant that misery to a new place, a new life and a new lover. However exciting I might imagine it would be to walk into that new world, I knew in my heart that it would only be a matter of time before the same problems re-emerged.
The other was a question I kept asking myself : “What is it that I am leaving for? ” What was this great future and life that I would be stepping into? Could I even see it clearly? More often than not, the fantasy portrayed a level of excitement I was missing. Crazy thoughts or a very lively fantasy I would call it now.

Some buried part of me knew that a life based on getting high on non-stop brain-blowing excitement wasn’t a life at all. Maybe it wasn’t alcohol or drugs that lured me, but it was surely the promise of intense and thrilling experiences, the opening scene of an adventure film without the need to wait for the complicated plot to unravel. There was no real alternative woman out there waiting for me, only a series of fantasies with easy gratification, never the hard part of dealing with a complicated human being in a sustained relationship. And inwardly I knew, I would still face the fears, depression and paralysis of will that had plagued me for so long.

That bit of consciousness kept me from breaking everything up and leaving the wonderful family that I’m blessed with.

So just imagine what my wife was going through. She had to face the rejection of my anger at the deepest levels. At the worst of it, she had to hear me telling her she wasn’t enough for me, that I needed more than she could give. And the tension and pain between us, the frequent rage that I felt, spilled into the lives of my children in ways that slowly and painfully were to emerge over time. 

That is the hardest part of talking about this now, to grasp how my closest loved ones disappeared from awareness into the haze of my own self-hatred, my own feeling of emptiness that I was desperately trying to fill. I had no idea how my behavior spread in its impact, like widening circles in water, to touch so many around me I’ll continue with this theme and try to get at what can be done or said to someone possessed of a longing to leave.

The longing to leave one’s intimate partner brings out something that isn’t much discussed in descriptions of depression. It is the active face of the illness. We often focus on the passive symptoms, the inactivity, the isolation, sense of worthlessness, disruption of focused thought, lack of will to do anything. But paradoxically the inner loss and need can drive depressed people to frenzied action to fill the great emptiness in the center of their lives. They may long to replace that inadequate self with an imagined new one that makes up for every loss. 
 

My experience with this phase of illness occurred when I had only limited awareness of the hold depression had on me. That may be a key to understanding the dynamic and how to respond to someone in the grip of this drive to turn life upside down. Unhappy without knowing why, I had to find an explanation, and the easiest way to do that was to look outward. I could only see my present life, my wife, my work as holding me back, frustrating my deepest desires. In effect, I was blaming everyone but me for my misery. In that state, I could only focus on the promise of leaving, finding a new mate, new work, new everything.

Every suggestion my wife might make that there was something wrong with me only brought the angriest denial. Every time she said how much she loved me only felt like a demand that I stay stuck in this unfulfilling life and do what she wanted me to do. I knew so clearly that I was not the problem, certainly not sick but for the first time on the verge of escaping into the exciting life I should have been living all along.

There is something very close to the power of addiction in the fantasy of escape. I found it almost impossible to see through the dreams of a new life. It meant so much – my survival as a person seemed to be at stake. Unaware of the full effect of depression, blocking out what my wife and others were trying to tell me, I inflicted a lot of pain on my family, thinking that I had to be brutally honest in order to save myself. Fortunately, as I noted in the last post on this subject, I had been through enough work in therapy to have glimmers of the truth, and that helped me step back from the brink.

I’m big on offering advice, but the potentially devastating impacts of depressed people on those closest to them leads me to go a bit beyond just reflecting on what I’ve been through. I see it different now my wife is stuck in a similar situation that has caused a burn out due to her boss.

If you’re trying to deal with the sudden transformation of an intimate partner, get help, starting with friends and family. You’ve likely felt such a deep assault and wound that it would be easy to get lost in the sheer humiliation, hurt and anger of the experience, searching for what you’ve done wrong, what you could do or say to set things right. That’s a trap set for you by the voice of depression. That voice tries to persuade you, just as it has persuaded your loved one, that it’s your fault. Not true. It’s your partner’s illness that’s at the root of it. 

Those closest to you and your partner have doubtless noticed something strange and may have been hurt as well by new behavior. That will remind you that you’re not alone in this. And remember that you can’t cure someone else with your words and love. They only backfire. At most, you can help your partner gradually gain awareness. It will take the combined influence of you and many others to get a depressed person to start seeing a different explanation for what’s wrong. Only your partner can do the heavy lifting. Only your partner can experience the inner change of thought and feeling that comes with the recognition that there is an illness to be dealt with.

I realize how different everyone’s experience is about the impact of depression on their marriage, and how desperately hard everyone works to reach what is for them the right answer about staying married or not. For me, though, it was a fantasy born of depression. I often wonder how it is, given where I began in my struggle to build a loving relationship with another human being, that my wife and I have stayed married for so long. “Marriage is survival,” I once heard someone say at a wedding, and the uncomfortable laughter in his large audience confirmed the truth of it. Despite all our struggles, we’ve managed to survive the worst of times.

For so many years, though, and long beyond adolescent dreams, I was searching obsessively not for the real work of two people always learning about each other. Depressed and full of shame at who I was, I searched desperately for someone who would make up what was missing, gifting me the worth I felt I lacked, so that I could feel like a whole person at last. I simply imagined I was falling in love. 

It would start with an attraction that soon became obsessive for a woman whose spirit and warmth I reached for instinctively to take in as my own. This was falling in love in a strangely one-sided way. I needed the responsiveness of the other person, to be sure, but only to a certain point. I can try to explain with a story, really a moment when something began to get through to my isolated mind.

I had, or imagined I had, an intense bond with K for nearly a year in my late teens. Her loving me meant everything. She was beautiful, talented and lively, and deep down I felt not just proud that she was part of my life, I felt alive and justified because of her presence. More than that, I projected into the minds of everyone I met the love of my live because such a woman loved me. That was the reality of what I needed from her, the sense of self-worth that I lacked on my own. I ignored what was clearly happening so desperate was I to believe that we would be together forever. After all, I was nothing without her. Our relationship came to end and I have been sick for days. My life was over. I promised myself not to start a relation again but to enjoy life

I was home, and we were up early, getting dressed and ready to get up for breakfast. I was avoiding deep talk. The windows were open to a fine Dutch winter morning. I was dousing my face with cold water in the bathroom as I had great hangover when suddenly I was startled by a beautiful singing voice floating in coming from the bedroom. It was a woman’s voice pouring a haunting melody into the air. It seemed to surround me, and the feeling and the sheer beauty of the tone put everything else out of my mind. I relaxed into its flow for a few still moments, and then I started to move. I had to find out where my future would start again. It seemed that I was ready for life again and I opened my heart and started a relationship again with the woman that I now call my wife. When I snapped out of my memories, I walked back to the bedroom and found my wife quietly sweeping a brush through her long blond hair.

“Did you hear that?” I asked.
“Hear what?”
“That incredible singing – it was the most beautiful thing. Where could it have come from?”
“Oh,” she laughed, “that was just the alarm clock.”
“Just now? Just right now? I mean, it stopped a few seconds ago.”
She nodded slowly, still brushing.
“I mean … I never heard that song before.”
She smiled into the mirror. “Well… now you have.”
She finished brushing her hair. We got our clothes on and left the room. 
 

To say I crashed when she left is putting it mildly. What could happen when my sense of who I was and what I was worth in the world walked away? Gone! There was nothing left! I would start drinking heavily, fall into complete depression, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t work, crying a lot, burned with the obsession of having to get her back. For the second time in my life, I don't think I will survive and end up at a psychiatrist. To heal enough so that I could function. Then I’d be able to resume my obsessive quest for a woman to make me feel whole again!

And so the pattern continues for years. When I met my wife and we got married, things seemed so different. But as soon as we got past the intense early years into the time when the relationship gets real or gets broken, I picked up again the habit of obsessing over that shortcut to fulfillment. I could dream of other women, other places, other careers that would end the inner fear, emptiness and pain. It was the sort of dreaming that would always keep me from hearing the song close by. The dreams gave me a way out instead of opening up and talking to the woman who loved me about the real crisis I was in. There was always a fantasy person elsewhere who wouldn’t need all that talking and honesty!

It took me many years, but finally the escape artist in me called it quits. Those fantasies came in such abundance that I just couldn’t take them seriously anymore. Only then could I get on with the work of recovery and the work of marriage.

I understand now when my wife says to me: “Are you still in love with me and if you don't than you should leave.” I guess that she is having a hard time now.



The Old Sailor,

I should be so lucky part 2

Dear Bloggers,

OPINION: The road to hell may well be paved with good intentions, but nobody told me that you would have to listen to a chorus of whingers along the way.

I was listening to the Radio the other day and they were discussing how we were sliding of slowly towards some sort of hell and there was no way we would ever look back on these present times as the "good ol' days" like they had back in the fifties and sixties.

What a load of ….....
We all know about the 'glass half full or glass half empty' metaphor and I hesitate to suggest that the current level is starting to be unreflective of the unimaginable bounties that we currently possess.

In other words, our glasses are almost full and too many of us are nagging about the bit that we are missing at the top.
I started writing my blog today as I wanted to expound on some of the more positive things that are going on.

Well, today I wanted to write about how incredibly fantastic it is to be alive in this modern age. 'What are you on?' I hear you say.

No, nobody laced my breakfast with ecstasy this morning.

I sometimes think the opposite is going on.

Maybe the whole population is being drugged to suppress their excitement and enthusiasm at their good fortune to be living in these wild times.
I was tripping around my house this morning belting out the chorus of Kylie Minogue's 'I should be so lucky' and my five-year-old was telling me to stop singing. It looks like they have got her too. Kylie is good example aswell if it comes to being positive, she is really a strong woman as she was struck by the horrible disease called cancer. Never let your head hang down, but fight.

It is all very well for me to keep on telling about how great it is to be here, but I must qualify my assertions.

I have always believed if you want to understand your place in the universe you must look at the wide view.
Fundamentally, each of us is just one of nearly seven billion bipedal apes shuffling around on a big spherical rock trying to procure a few basic needs- namely food, shelter, and, if you're lucky, a bit of reproduction.

It looks as though we have achieved these basic requirements rather well and by all accounts most of us are in bloom.
Judging by the number of overly corpulent persons crawling down the streets of the western world, many of us are not flowering at all.

It is a rather telling paradox of our times that our problem is not that we don't have enough to eat; it is that we can't stop shovelling tasty morsels into our gaping mouths.

At no time in the history of civilisation has there been societies where the general population has been so affluent that they have been able to consume all the meat, sugar and carbohydrates to their labouring hearts' content.

Yet we still complain.

Our car is not new enough, taxes are too complex, society is too crime ridden.

Reality check: You have a car. Your taxes bring are wide range of services that have become essential to your life. You probably haven't been a victim of a serious crime recently, and if you have been, just remember you are still here to fight another day. (there are two things we are sure of in this life: death and taxes.)

Let's go back a couple of thousand years and you can be sure that things wouldn't nearly have been so rosy.

Some of your brothers or sisters would have surely died in childhood.

Disease would have been a constant threat.

Running water and functioning sewerage would have been but a distant dream.

And murder a not uncommon practice.

Do you think they sat around the fireplace bitching about issues like whether or not we should put folic acid in our bread?
We are much more unlikely to die a violent death these days than at any time in history. Something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler.

In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today.

Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

I like the idea of Thanksgiving eventhough there will be thousands of turkey's killed for it.

I don't know exactly who or what we are supposed to thank, maybe God, maybe some exotic religion, maybe your mother, but I think it would be good to spend a day every year reflecting on the fact that our glasses are almost full to overflowing and the little things that send us into apoplectic fits of self-pity and disgust are really just a small beer.

You don't need to wait until this special day of reflection though.

You can do it right now.

Look around you, examine the detail, think of where you have come from and where you are going and if you really get it, if you really, truly understand the situation in which you currently exist, it should blow your freakin' mind.

If you can't climb out of your own reality so easily, but there's a place somewhere in your surrounding that might do the trick.

Surrounded by some pieces of our beautiful nature and if you don't have any kind of happy feelings as you consider your place in the universe you really have been drugged into submission by some dark forces determined to keep you from being happy.

I'm the first to admit that I'm not always the paragon of cheeriness and positivity, but the concept that we are all extremely fortunate to be here is never far from my thoughts.

It is great to be here and I hope you can see that too.

You all enjoy the rest of the summer while I take off to the next door neighbors beautiful country and relax for a few days.

The Old Sailor,