i’ve been thinking about this for a few days now and even though this is probably going to take me some time to put together, i wanted to start putting something down on paper. i wanted to start putting my thoughts together.

over the years, i’ve had more than my fair share, i’d say, of emotional issues. i’ve seen two separate shrinks, had virtually no self-esteem until my adult years, contemplated suicide in high school, nearly dropped out of college, been laid up in bed by depression for days at a time, and prescribed anti-depressants.

these problems were both the reason for and cause of my inability to relate to, or interact with, women romantically. in my life, i’ve only been on one or two official dates and haven’t been in more that a sparse few, brief, relationships. for years i wondered why i was so miserable, why i disliked myself so much, why i was so awkward and shy, and why i was so bad with the opposite sex.

my parents divorced when i was very young; i have no memory of them together.

in the beginning, it never occurred to me that my problems might be a direct result of my parents’ divorce. i couldn’t see how that might be the case. as far as i knew, my parents were never together, though i understood at a young age the concept of marriage and divorce. even when the idea was proposed to me for the first time, probably sometime around the end of middle school, beginning of high school, i shrugged off the notion as ridiculous. how could the root of all my problems lay in the end of a relationship and marriage that i never knew, never remembered?

one of my aunts, one of two shrinks in my family, believed this to be the case, and even bought me a book once, called ‘coping with divorce,’ or some such title. i never opened it, never gave it a second look, a second thought, because i thought the whole idea to be silly and off base.

during my teenage years, i struggled to find the cause of my misery, my absent self-esteem. for a time, i thought some of the cause lay in my father’s disappointment in me. i thought he disliked me and was embarrassed i was his son. in an attempt to cope with this and to improve my self-esteem, i stopped visiting my father, stopped talking to him, broke all contact and interaction with him for a few years. if he hadn’t outright insisted that i attend my grandparents’ 50th (maybe 60th?) wedding anniversary, there’s a fair chance that to this day i still wouldn’t be speaking to him.

shortly thereafter, i determined that my father, in fact, didn’t dislike me and wasn’t disappointed in me. we get along famously now…. so, i was back to square one in finding the source of my unhappiness.

in college, i turned my attention away from my father and toward another source, though it was more immediate and short term; a friend, crush, and love of my life (or so i thought at the time). she broke my heart over and over so hard and so thoroughly i at one point, literally, thought i was going to die.  i don’t think anyone will ever crush me so completely ever again. ultimately, though, she wasn’t the root of my problems, merely another in a long line of painful symptoms. the last time she broke my heart was also the last straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. just a few days later, i left oxford forever with plans of moving to hawai‘i.

for reasons i can’t quite explain, i thought moving here would be the answer to all my problems. i guess at the time it sounded good partly because i needed to get as far away from that girl as possible. a small island chain in the middle of the pacific seemed it could be worlds away and so i departed.

i did move here with goals in mind. i told myself that the move would just what i need to get my shit together. i told myself i would do whatever it took to get better. and so i did. mostly. after over a nearly a year in this place, i finally started seeing a therapist regularly, every other week for over almost three years. i learned a lot about myself, about what was wrong with me, and how to improve.

i say improve, because i’m not fixed. i may never be fixed. i learned two invaluable lessons during my multi-year therapy. first, i learned that the reasons for my sickness weren’t nearly as important as getting better. it was a hard lesson to learn. in the whole span of my memory, i couldn’t recall a moment when i didn’t think finding the root cause of my illness was the key to finding my cure. it took several months, i’m sure, of bi-weekly sessions for the doctor to break me from this notion and we were well into my therapy before i relented my search for the source. so, it doesn’t matter where my depression and self-doubt came from. after all, isn’t depression a physiological illness, an imbalance of chemicals in the brain, and not necessarily the effect of some deep emotional trauma? once i learned not to be so concerned with the reasons, it was easier to move forward. at the time, i was so focused on getting better that, after a good amount of convincing, i agreed it wasn’t important.

the second invaluable lesson was just to be happy with myself. embrace my quirks and embrace myself. now, that’s not to say i should stop trying to improve; isn’t self-improvement one of the points of living? it’s ok that i’m shy around new people. it’s ok that i don’t like loud, crowded clubs or parties. it isn’t the end of the world that i’m bad at small talk, or beginning a conversation. these are traits that are part of who i am, but don’t have to define me as a person. this lesson was by far the most important. if i hadn’t been able to come to accept these traits in me, there’s not telling where i’d be now: probably still stuck in an endless cycle of emotions between numb and depressed.

am i still terrible with the opposite sex? yes, mostly. and so this brings me, two pages later, to the heart of the matter.

fast forward two and a half years after the conclusion of my therapy. this past november, i was back in overland park for the wedding of two good friends. while i was home, my mom insisted that i spend some time cleaning out my room. i obliged her and in the midst of the packing (i don’t remember the conversation, or how it came up) she made some quip about her belief that the divorce from my father had caused my brother and i some emotional or psychological damage. i was so shocked by her frankness that i didn’t (couldn’t) respond. after all these years, i had no idea she thought that. so i started to seriously think about it. could it be true? could my troubled childhood be the result of some unknown damaged caused by my parents’ short-lived marriage?

i haven’t a clear answer. even now, i find the proposition difficult to accept. i never knew them together. sure, i come from a broken home, but both my parents remarried and they are still married. i’ve seen examples of what i would call good, healthy marriages. i know (at least i believe i do) what it should be like. so how could the end of a marriage, that occurred when i wasn’t more than three years old, have such long lasting effects on my psyche?

my best friend from high school grew up in what i now see was a much more screwed up home situation that i, but he seems to have turned out just fine. (he might claim otherwise)

as so many of my posts seem to, this will end with little or no resolution. as i so often do, i will send this out into the vast world of cyberspace and await comment or insight. in the meantime, i have concluded that there is a question i should pose to both my parents; how, if at all, do you think your divorce screwed me up?