ATONEMENT Part I: Breakthrough the Looking Glass

Do you know what they say about dying in your dreams?  If you are about to die, you just wake up.  That happened to me, only in real life.

In my last blog entry I faced a rabbit hole of fire and my Purgatory world literally ripped itself to oblivion.  I had every intention of diving into Hell, catching my angel, killing my Jabberwocky satan, learning to defy gravity, and flying out like a hero.  I was going to somehow soar into an open sky where I would find blissful atonement.  If I could not do it in real life, I would do it in fiction.  As usual, however, things didn’t go according to plan.

As my real life fell apart, I couldn’t just survive through writing and so I went to a psychologist.  I told him about my perceived selfishness and similarity to Scarlett, the way people loved and hated me, the attacks, my fears, my insecurities, my strengths, my Peter Pan complex, my dreams, my romances and everything else that consumed my mind.  At the end of the first session, he blew my mind with a simple question,  “You seem to live in your mind through imagination and films; do you find reality disappointing?”

My world shattered and my eyes welled up the moment he said it.  I instantly realized what was wrong.  Everything I was doing and living was happening more in my head than in real life. The men I loved became grandiose princes and angels.  My meaningful, but often limited, activist work was that of superhero proportions.  The day-to-day drama was the plotline of a film and its songs the soundtrack of my life.  As realization took hold, the augmented and imaginary aspects of my world were ripped from reality and the depression and sadness I long denied surfaced for the first time in my life.  Reality was disappointing, and the fragmentation I’d been feeling, fighting and about which I had been writing for so long had actually been caused by my own imagination.

For the next few days I cried my eyes out.  I held desperately to my films and songs, specifically Inception, Alice in Wonderland and Katy Perry’s “Not Like the Movies.”  My mind was desperate to go back to the imaginary world.  I opened my mind to the possibility of infinite universes and parallel times and convinced myself they were all equally real.  But with that defensive and unobservable reality came desperation to escape and, for a moment, I genuinely wanted to die. My little totem was spinning and I wanted to feel real and happy again…in the way I had always known.

Now I know this all sounds crazy, but trust me when I say that it comes from a place of deep intelligence and awareness.  I never would kill myself for fear of hurting those I love in this reality, but I’m choosing to share this because it was a shocking, unique and extremely new feeling for someone like me.  I’ve never once thought of myself as unhappy or scared to live, but as it turns out I’ve been genuinely denying reality my whole life.

From the very beginning, my parents protected me from the outside world and I became isolated.  I was smart they said, but I was very different and there were lots of bad people out there.  Not everyone understood or accepted the fact that I wore skirts, played with dolls or pretended to be Alice in Wonderland.  As a result, imagination, books, music, video games, TV and movies were always my escape.  The defense mechanism became so strong that I was able to completely deny my sexuality until I was 18 years old by living vivid, heroic, hetero, albeit non-sexual, scenarios in my head.

I thought ‘coming out’ was the end of my fractured self, but coming to San Diego and facing an entire community of people has led me to discover latent versions of this problem. I never had more than a few friends back in the Bay Area and that allowed me to maintain a sense of emotional and intellectual isolation, but now as an activist and role model in the Hillcrest community I can’t get away with inappropriately interacting with others and mismanaging my differing realities.  After reaching breaking point with one too many poorly constructed friendships and relationships, I’ve finally discovered the root cause of my problems and am now consciously deciding to kill the defense mechanism.

This starts with the broken and fictional portions of my blog.  Even in my writing and emotional coping, I use hyperbolic fiction to augment my own reality.  I don’t want to do that anymore.  I have not lost my imagination or creativity, but rather I’ve gained an important and mature control over it and the emotions I feel.  Simply by becoming aware of my defense mechanism, I suddenly understand so much more about my life and the reality I’ve been denying.

I understand why I’ve had a nagging fear of being ordinary (nothing about the world in which I wanted to live was ordinary).  I understand why I’ve always wanted to be an actor (because life has always been an act for me) and why I became an activist (to be a hero).  I understand why people sometimes find me shallow or insincere (I limit relationships to maintain isolation and protect my fantasy world).  I understand how and why my relationships have all failed (I focus on fantasy but never work with genuine emotions).  I understand why I overeat and overindulge in sensory pleasures (to attempt to feel real and alive).  I understand why I often feel empty, ungrounded, disturbed, or crazy (I never committed to this reality).  I understand why I feel like an alien and relate to Superman (I didn’t feel I belonged in this reality).  I understand why I concentrate on sins and love (because I criticize and am fascinated by the innate and fundamental emotions and actions of humans).

I studied sociology so that I could act in accordance with people, but all the while maintained distance and isolation.  I am very social, but not intimately so.  I fictionalize and characterize people and myself with archetypes and original/rehashed screenplays from my head.  All of this has been an attempt to go through the looking glass and into my dream world, but all it has done is cost me love and humanity in the real world.  I have felt broken and soulless, and now I am finally done pretending.

There very well may be an infinite number of parallel universes, continuums, layers of dreams or realities, but I am living, breathing and feeling in this one.  And while death is inevitable and none of this may ultimately matter, there’s plenty of time to worry about the bigger picture and infinite time/space philosophy bullshit when I’m gone.  While I’m here in this body, mind, and soul, I am capable of wonderful, genuine and real human connections…and I’m done wasting that.  I knew love would be the key to atonement, but I never realized it was me who needed to accept, live and love reality itself.  I have always said that my family and friends make me feel at home with their love, but I feel I’m only just now truly accepting that gift.  I’m here in this reality to live and love, now and until I die, one hundred percent.  And with that commitment, I finally feel whole.

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