You know, I’m physically strong and large, have a fairly high physical pain tolerance and even higher emotional pain tolerance, and am definitely not a coward, but I have to say, there are a lot of days I have more in common with Nathan Lane in “The Bird Cage” than I do Michael Corleone.
This is a part of my on-going inventory taking. I don’t have any idea who I am, at root. I’m still trying to figure it out. What I definitely think I am not is an honest tough guy. I can dissociate, and do what needs to be done, but it always takes a toll. I can’t do it over the long haul.
I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know quite a few Special Operations types over the years, and whatever they have, I don’t, I don’t think. The one question mark is that I am very certainly obsessive. Harnessed and pushed in the right direction, it could make a difference in my performance capacity. I am driven emotionally, but would need to figure out how to steer straight, something I have never yet managed to do.
I was talking with an ex-SAS guy a month or two ago, and he figured it was just something you were born with. I said “like the ability to sing?”, and he thought for moment, smiled-ish, and said yes.
My whole life has been focused on conflict. I have never known a moment’s complete rest. Relatively speaking, of course, countless moments. I get to sleep every night. But I have never had faith in people or the future. Life has never seemed to me like something likely to work out for me. It has never seemed like sustained happiness of any sort was in the cards for me.
A couple times in recent days, though, I caught a whiff of something different, something peaceful, something conflict free, and it felt strange, but good. Some part of me will no doubt push it away many times, but it’s in my mind now, and some parts of my affective world remains under my conscious control, so I think I can slowly reel it closer, at least, and hopefully eventually into that event-prone and moving gestalt I call my Self.
I will add that the manliest men are loving and kind. That I think I can do, over some time horizon. Not super close at the moment.