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My mother has a way of telling me that I’m acting out of sync with the rest of the world. She says “here comes the aardvark.” When I was in First Grade, everyone was asked to pick their favorite animal. In a room of 27 kitties, puppies and bunnies, I said “aardvark”. Twenty-eight years later I blend a little better, but I still make the aardvark mistake all the time.

People ask me questions, and I answer them honestly. I like the show Entourage because it is a Joseph Campbell-esque exploration of traditional male archetypes. My brother and I taught ourselves to cook when we were too young to reach the stove without a stool, and by the age of eleven my brother was learning the recipes from the Cafe des Artistes cookbook. I don’t have any other answers to the questions “why do you like Entourage?” and “how did you and your brother start cooking?” That’s my life, and it’s not weird to me. Still, I get it. I will always be punished for seeing the world through a different lens. I am the aardvark.

Small aside here. That last post turned out to be like a fun house mirror. What warped reflections people see.

The funny thing about having hit bottom at some point in life is that it makes the signs of hitting bottom so obvious in other people. Unfortunately, in my experience, it doesn’t make the signs any more obvious in yourself. When you see them in other people though, it’s like a spotlight on trouble.

Hitting bottom does not look like I thought it would before I got there myself. I thought it would mean that everything was shit, and that there didn’t seem to be a way out. What I have found to be true for me and those around me is that it’s not that everything is shit, because that is really obvious and you’d know that was happening. I mean, if you lose your job, bury a relative and turn to bourbon to get through it all, it’s pretty glaringly obvious that there’s a real problem and the real problem police will rush in to save you. You’ll be in group therapy in no time. That’s not the bottom.

The bottom is when there’s one thing in your life that is so wrong to the core that it seems to you that the solution is out of reach. You’ve accepted that your life can, in this aspect, not be redeemed. That loss of hope - that’s as bad as it gets. Recovery from that takes more than therapy and more than inner strength. I hesitate to call it a miracle. It’s more of a revelation.

Once, when I was at my highest weight of about 280, I was riding metro. At that time, riding metro was a big deal to me. The walk between metro and my apartment was difficult, despite being only a few blocks, and there was always the looming fear that an “up” escalator would be out and I’d have to walk. So, on this one day I had brought myself to get over the fear of riding metro, and during the ride I looked around the car at the ads. One was to train for a marathon with the local HIV prevention and treatment clinic. It was geared towards first time participants and implied that they could take someone at any fitness level and ready them in so many weeks of training. I burst into tears. This ad implied that 26.2 miles was possible for anyone, and I lived in fear of walking up the short escalator from the platform to the turnstile. I knew, down deep, not only that a marathon wasn’t possible for me, but that the hope of a marathon wasn’t possible. In my mind, I didn’t have the tools to even begin. That is the bottom.

It took two more years, but I eventually did run/walk a half marathon. That 13.1 miles was quite enough. I did have a revelation. It came slowly, and when it came I was able to do things I didn’t know I could do. Everything that I accepted as impossible was suddenly easy. Having the revelation itself though, was not easy at all. That took balls.

Right now I’m seeing people in my life hit bottom. I don’t know of any way to stop them mid-fall. Really, I don’t know of any way to fix it once it happens either. It’s got to come from inside - that I learned the hard way. There’s nothing more annoying than the preachings of a convert. Knowing all that doesn’t make watching this any easier.

All writers and poets eventually get to a road scene. Someone is either on one, choosing one, picturing one or anthropomorphizing one. The funny thing is that it’s usually to a good result. I can think of a lot of good “road” poems, stories and books. Normally I would purposely avoid writing about something so already written, but here I’m inclined to add one of my own to the mix. Heck, it’s not like writing about a cloud.

I’ve been on this road for a while. Not a long while, or even a good while, but a while. Thirty-three years. And I’ve been on a straight shot, no matter what anyone else will tell you. My goal has always made sense to me. I have not taken the long way; I’ve taken the only way.

When I look behind me there’s so little I regret. I don’t think everything I’ve done or every decision I’ve made makes sense to anyone else, but it makes a world of sense to me. This is just who I am. All that has come, and all that will come, is just part of me. The lack of a grand plan does not imply the lack of any plan at all.

When I was a teenager, and I looked to be at my most lost, my mother asked me what future I saw for myself. I told her I just wanted to finish college, have a career, marry, and raise children in a little house somewhere where I’d have enough to not struggle without worrying about how much I had. But you had to see me - I had a mohawk and piercings, with the 14-eye Doc Marten boots and the clothing that was meant to make a statement. In retrospect, the statement was “I can’t be bothered to patch holes or wash”, but at the time if felt more like “you should be impressed with how different I am”. Yet how much had I strayed? My ideal was one picket fence short of Mayberry.

It hasn’t happened for a long time, but years ago I used to run into people from high school. When I did, they would be scared to ask the usual questions. You could see that their first instinct was to say “so, where’d you go to school? Where do you work?” Then they’d stop themselves and say “sooo….what….well….how are YOU?” It took a lot to stop myself from giving the first reply that came to mind (which, for the record, was “well, after I finished the jail sentence for off-ing that preppy who asked me too many questions I took up drugging pretty suburban girls and selling them into slavery. Can I buy you a drink?”) and answering with what really was the best revenge. The truth. The beautiful and unreal truth that innate intelligence, verbal ability and fate had prevailed over everyone’s best efforts and assumptions. That I was doing fine. Not that I didn’t struggle, because I have, but that I would be fine. Sometimes better than fine. Happy even.

I’m finding it more difficult than I suspected to write about the struggle. Depression and addiction is still a lot to think about. Before I get there though, I think it helps me to remind myself that all of the pain isn’t a diversion from the point; the pain is the point. Just because no one else can find my path doesn’t mean it diverged. I know where I’m going.

I’ve been avoiding this blog recently because there’s just too much going on. For some reason I think writing about everything has increased my anxiety by forcing me to confront the issues, rather than decrease my anxiety by functioning as a release valve.

My anxiety is because of the way people get married. It’s ridiculous. The fuss is obscene. I know my future MIL wants a big fuss because she’s just so excited, but she’s going to, quite accidentally, push me over the edge. After the first of several planned showers, she said she was disappointed that people didn’t “ooh and aaah” over me. That comment caused another panic attack. What if they had gone ooh and aah - how would I possibly have survived.

In the midst of all this there is much comic relief. This weekend I went shopping at the Korean market up the street. I picked out a lovely chinese eggplant (the “c” in chinese is lower case on purpose - I think it’s like when you say that something has catholic appeal). Anyway, a young woman was shopping with her great-grandmother. The women were about 25 and 95 respectively. I picked up my favorite eggplant of the bunch to put it in my basket and the great-grandmother snatched it out of my hand and placed it in her bag. I couldn’t decide what was funniest; it’s either the oblivion of the 95 year old, the horror of the 25 year old, or the fact that a 95 year old was so easily able to separate me from my produce. I’ll think about this whenever I get stressed out.