being sober 2

i have work hard the last 2 months. i try not to overthink things. when you overthink things, you can get paralyzed. i'm trying to change my little corner of the world for the good and to stop complaining about the world.

i'm thinking about delayed gratification. esau traded his birthright for a bowl of soup. i've done that. drinking was my reward for working, my pleasure. even sex was a reward for hard work or some work. it did not make my relationship very good. it seemed like i was the only one getting pleasure while she was thinking of other things. i must love her as the beloved. it sounds so easy but it is hard.

i like the serenity prayer. i like the prayer of saint francis but i am having a tough time dealing with my anger which flares up at random times.

it flares up with the kids when they don't do what i ask them to do. it flares up and dies shortly after. i feel like i've been robbed somehow. i've been robbed of my sexuality and manhood.

i guess it starts with my father. my father had no influence in my life. he was always working when i was younger. when i first went to his store, i was embarrassed. i was ashamed. my friend's fathers were lawyers and doctors. my father just owned a shabby store.

it was my mother who made the major decisions in my life. but she was absent too. nobody seemed to care about me except my jewish friends in narberth, pennsylvania.

i think it was the lack of emotional closeness, the lack of the radiance of being loved that made me drinking when i was young. also the sense of shame i carried like hester prynne in the scarlet letter.

my mother had figuratively castrated my father when she suspected him of having an affair. that sexual shame translated into a complete lack of eros from her, a coldness from her.

although we lived in the same house, there was very little emotion in our family, although there was negative emotion. we lived in a house, not a home.

that was when i started to drink. after blacking out after drinking grain alcohol, i said that "my father tried to kill me." i don't know what i meant by that but i had gone to the other side of myself, the darker part and become that.

alcohol also had a liberating feeling. i felt that i could say anything i wanted to and it transformed my consciousness. this was during a time in which i was discovering myself. 13 years old. liberating myself. i think i intuited that i did not want the life of my parents. who wanted to work all day, come back home and not even dress well. who wanted to work so hard and look so tired all the time. so i created a fantasy, i created a phallus... alcohol was my phallus, my sexuality in a way, a place where i could create myself without any fear of judgement. drinking and smoking pot was a reaction to not having a home, being homeless, not finding a place where my heart could be still, burning with the stillpoint of the universe, immersed in prayer or meditation or joyful psalms.

of course, home also meant discipline. i was hardly ever disciplined, mainly because my parents were preoccupied with other concerns. in a way, this atmosphere of "everything is permissible" seemed like paradise.