Mirror games

So, if you are a patient, faithful reader, you will know that one of my big “discoveries” of the past year has been that my brain is not trying to kill me. Rather, my brain is working extra hard to try and figure things out for me, look at the really hard, painful stuff of my life and try to make sense of it. It’s hard. It’s uncomfortable. Most of the time I don’t want to see it. So I blame my brain for my… well for my shortcomings. My brain, it turns out, is not trying to kill me. Who Knew?

If you are a patient, faithful reader, you are still reading.

Favorite movie quotes.

One. “A spear” and two “it helps, it really helps.” One is from “Apocalypse Now”, and the second is from “Harry Potter: Prisoner from Azkaban”. Why bring them up here?

Imagine if you will the shock I experienced when my life long companion, no, not my wife, but the voice inside my head, turned out not to be my enemy but my friend.

“A spear” Chief Phillips looks at his mortal enemy and realizes that it was not his perceived foe, but a random act of savage violence, that would end his life.

“It helps, it really helps” Professor Lupin offers Harry a piece of chocolate after his first dementor attack. Sometimes the simple creature comforts are cures for those things that ail us.

You know. I spend a lot of time thinking about the things that are wrong in my life. I think about fame and fortune and everything thing that goes with it. I want them all.

One night in college I had a lot to drink. I stumbled back to my dorm room and slipped into my bathrobe. I was about to turn out the light when I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was dirty. My hair, unkept. But the more I looked, that more I became engaged with the image of myself. I stared until all I could see where my own eye looking back at me and still I continued to stare. My vision blurred, my eyes waters and still I continued to stare, I could see the faint red lines of the veins in my pupils. I could see them pulsing. I could see the pock marks on my skin, the hairs in my lashes. I have later discovered that this kind of intense focus is not hard to arrive at, but at the time, perhaps because of excessive drink, I thought it was amazing.

“This is who I am” I thought to myself. “This is me.”

I have to tell you, I am pretty sure I went through the same kind of experience when I was thinking about the way I thought about myself. “My brain is not trying to kill me!”

Neither is a vision of who I am.
Remarkable.

Recently I rekindled a relationship with a friend of twenty years. I won’t go into the details here but at the end of a recent conversation, my friend pointed out the similarities that existed between us then and now. “Some things have changed and some things are still the same.” Eerie. It is funny but, in a moment I realized I am so much more than these parts.

Damn it! Now I have to go back and reevaluate the whole thing all over!