003: Back Home
Feedback loops and Fatherhood
For most people within my social circle, their childhood home is a place of comfort; a constant that will always be there waiting for them when the world kicks their teeth in. A place where they can find peace associated with simpler times and agreed upon politics. From the outside in, my hometown is all of those things. A small rural town in western PA that’s surrounded by nature (our back deck stairs East-bound, directly into the woods, giving us no shortage of birds, deer, raccoons and the occasional bear that come right up to our house). A town that’s close enough to Pittsburgh for the Steelers to be the main idolatry of most households. We even have a famous groundhog to top it all off. I never remember a time growing up where we worried about money. My father was able to retire at 56 due to his service in the Air Force. My mother is the definition of unconditional love. We have an in ground swimming pool. Nana lives 5 minutes down the road. Our neighbors are our best friends. And I have unlimited access to the family Amazon account.
Yes, home for me sounds ideal compared to a lot people’s version of family and childhood, nature and nurture. And for the first couple of hours it always is, and I am beyond blessed to have this place and this family. But around the 4 hour mark, the ‘thoughts’ start their engines.
Yesterday I explored Anxiety. Today I am living it. Whenever I go back home, I am first showered in love. My mother is always somehow in the kitchen when I walk in the front door, and she greets me with a soft, high-pitched, “Yeeeeeee! (as in Kan-Ye). Hi Sweetie! Oh, always so great to see you walk through that door!” It really is heart-warming. Hallmark would kill for this kind of genuine love to be captured on screen.
My Mom and Dad love me. It’s wonderfully obvious. They love all four of us kids. But I wish it was 1:1. I wish that when they showed me love, I reciprocated with the same amount and enthusiasm. I wish I had the same ability to crack jokes with my parents as I do with my friends. I wish conversations flowed instead of me giving one word answers, at most a sentence or two. I don’t know if most people want this, but I do. And I don’t know what is wrong.
I am a shell of myself around my parents, family in general. I talk less, and when I do open my mouth it’s usually in an aggravated tone. Unfortunately, I am like this most with my Dad. I stare at my Dad as he shuffles his feet around the house, taking 17 handfuls of dry roasted peanuts after dinner. Or watch him stretch on the living room floor for 45 seconds. Or listen to him rattle off his plethora of injuries he’s sustained, and how he’s so much better now, and how much pain he was in before. Then watch him lay on the recliner watching a YouTube video while the rest of us are at the table talking. I get so frustrated with him, and then I realize that I do 90% of the same things. Men spend the first quarter of their life idolizing their Dad. The second quarter rejecting him. The third quarter fathering him. And the last quarter becoming him.
I am in that second quarter, unfortunately. And giving my current circumstances in life, (“medical sabbatical” from work, which I’m pretty sure is a euphemism for “take two weeks off from this job to find yourself another job”, a past concussion which still may or may not be causing issues [and not knowing is worse than knowing], and a failed engagement) I would say everything is turned up to 11 on the rejection/resentment scale.
So what did I decide to do? Come back home. A normal reaction for most, but a knowingly stupid idea for me. Because here I am, 18 hours into being back home and my chest hurts, my sentences are one-worded, and I have an existential scream in my head that I am running from all responsibilities in life and I’ll never amount to anything.
And so a nasty feedback loop kicks:
Anxiety → Try to do something that takes my mind of off Anxiety → The thought that I am not doing anything productive causes Anxiety → Try to do something productive, but do to stress or concussion or whatever else we want to throw into there, I underperform → Anxiety…
And that’s pretty much sums up the past 8 months. Now let’s add in the fact that I look at this town as the complacency capital of the world and I find myself on a treadmill of negative self-talk that’s on a 15.0 incline and 10.0 speed. Everyone here is good with “good enough”, and it drives me up a wall. Mostly because I’ve done more or less nothing so far in life; I am the definition of “good enough”. So, as with all things, I hate in others what I hate about myself.
And just now, a doe walks out of the woods and into our yard. The sun is high enough in the sky to feel it. The birds haven’t stop singing this whole morning. And the dew is just about dry.
Maybe home isn’t so bad. At least for the next couple of moments.