Revisiting the Past

The past week or so I have been finally transcribing my notes I had sporadically written when I was living on the streets. The couple of notebooks were always around but I did my best to avoid them.

These pages were linked to a past where I hurt myself and those that cared about me. I was a toxic person that my friends had to put at arms length, even though it caused them pain.

Until recently I did not want to go back to that horrible period of my life. It was done and past. Yet this blog dredged up some of the past when I started the posts on the homeless. I realized I had to go back.

People do not like to revisit the past. They prefer to push it back into the attics of their minds. But it can stay there, just festering. Something in the past become like an open wound which never fully gets a scab. So it becomes breeding ground for maggots, which can be a good thing. And it can be bad.

I cannot describe the vitriol I have for two people who contributed to my descent into depression and homelessness. The anger and bitterness has been eating at me for the longest time, always aimed at these two people. Which is not a good thing.

Yet the vitriol has been tempered by what I wrote. Be it my father or Marie, they are not evil people. What they did was because of things I did. There are always three sides to a story: mine, theirs and the truth.

The past while, emotions have been rampant. I was in tears again when I transcribed the part where I had to put my cats to sleep. I was seething during the part where Marie did not believe my pain was serious when I fractured my hip. I was stunned at the broke promises Marie had made leading her to become a complete psycho and me losing over $20,000 of stuff. I was dumbfounded by the games my father played to get me out of the house from the moment I moved back. Or how he never once tried to support me during my decent into depression, leaving my mother (once again) to be caught in the middle.

And then I had to confront the things I did, the lies I said, the stupid ass antics I did which pissed off my friends and family. Stuff I should not have done but did because I was extremely toxic back then.

Even when I finally got off the street, started to build my life again, there were old habits I fell back into which caused problems and tension in my life. Be it playing a shell game with my money or over-medicating myself with beer to avoid problems.

I have stumbled and fallen the past couple of years. I have fucked up badly. I don’t know how many times I has pissed off my friends like Mike, Brian and Errol. But they have stuck by me, unlike Marie or my father.

Yet the revisiting is letting me see what strides I have made since my nervous breakdown Christmas 2000. I spiralled and ended up living on the streets, mostly at my own hands. But precipitated by the actions of people like my father and Marie. Yet I did get back on my feet and started to reconstruct my life.

I did not do this alone. During this time, different friends helped the best they could but it had to always come back to me. I had to take responsibility. I had to dust myself off when I fell. I had to live with stupid decisions that caused me to stumble. I had to use all the tools I was learning to fight the demons that tried to strangle me with depression and anxiety attacks. And still do.
There were speed bumps along the way, some of my own doing, some not. And along the way making me a better and slightly stronger person.

Someone at work, Teresa once asked me why wasn’t I bitter about all that had happened. Going back to my notes I can see why. Even the ‘villains’ in my story were not evil, just damaged people who could not help me because they cannot help themselves. In some ways, they are more broken than I am.

Except for a short time at the beginning of all this, I would not fall into victim mode. I had put myself into the situations which lead to me living at the OBM. I ignored signposts, playing ostrich until it was too late. I didn’t take control of my life and let others control it for me. The reality is there is only one person to blame in all of this: myself. But blaming and bitterness do not lead to a solution. It adds to the spiral. I could not let bitterness take hold, because it would just feed the depression.

I plan to share more over the next while about some of the things that happened to get me where I am today. It has been hard revisiting the past but it is time to clean the attic.

I am proud of the things I have done to get where I am today. I could have just laid down and given up many times over the past few years but I didn’t. I suppose it is the stubborn Scorpio I am.

At the same time, life is wonderful. It can be vibrant and exciting. I look at some of the people I have met at the church I occasionally go to. Or some of the new people in my life like Bob, Matt or Jason. And my renewed friendships with people like Brian. But there are days where life is pure utter shit. It is a give and take.

So what is the moral of this post? You have to go back and revisit the past every so often. Little demons haunt the dark corners of our past and affect us in the present. You have to go back and deal with them. And see what progress you have made.

Life is a journey, one step at a time. There will be times you fall. So get back up and brush off the dust from the path you are on. Then move on. But don’t forget to look back. The past can drag you down without you knowing, stop you from moving forward. You may not like to look back and see the shitty things back there but you have to. The more the attic gets cluttered, the harder it is to do spring cleaning. After a while, you don’t even try and end up like people like my father and Marie. Bitter, lonely people who know a lot of people but have no friends. Just existing and anything that threatens their safe existence that can’t be control must be discarded immediately.

So the Hallmark comment of the day is: The future is bright only as long as the past doesn’t cloud it.