Okay, yesterday’s entry went off down a rabbit hole I did not intend to visit. Sorry about that.
Getting back to what should have been the topic — the year just ended — I wrote yesterday that 2012 was “traumatic and evolutionary and life-changing, a real personal watershed for me… ” Sounds like a moment in time that ought to be recorded in some fashion, so let’s at least jot down the highlights, shall we?
- The year began with my dad having emergency surgery to remove his gallbladder, followed by complications that led to a week in the hospital.
- The Girlfriend moved in with me.
- I was diagnosed with Type II diabetes, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol. In other words, I officially hit middle age. Yay, me.
- The GF and I went on a Hawaiian cruise with her parents.
(Note that all of those events happened within a month of each other, and the latter three within just a couple weeks of each other.)
- While still recovering from his surgery and hospital stay, Dad turned an unfinished basement space into a master bedroom for Anne and me, nearly single-handed. (That’s a story I really need to chronicle one of these days… and for the record, I’ve officially abandoned any hope of ever being as competent, useful, and all-round manly as my old man.)
- My employer relocated to a shiny, new, upscale building in a shiny, new, upscale neighborhood.
- And just before my 43rd birthday, I had all four of my wisdom teeth removed, only about 25 years later than they should have been. For the record, I opted to do it the macho way with only a local anesthetic, so I remained aware of pretty much everything the oral surgeon was doing. I could still feel my mouth, it just didn’t hurt. (For the record, the crack of a tooth breaking free of the jaw is… unsettling.) So I guess I’ve got that on my dad.
Oh, and somewhere in the midst of all that, I attended my annual Rick Springfield concert, drove solo across the Nevada desert to see my dad put his ’56 Nomad through its paces at a car show, and just a week ago took The Girlfriend to see Donny and Marie Osmond. And last but not least, I also met Carrie Fisher… yes, that Carrie Fisher, the actress, screenwriter, novelist, advocate for mental-health issues, and once-and-future space princess of my adolescent dreams. Weirdly enough, she reminded me a lot of my mom. Another story I really need to tell someday.
Now, when I refer to those events as traumatic, I don’t necessarily mean they were bad. Anne moving in with me, for instance, was not remotely bad. Which isn’t to say we haven’t been through some rough spots as we’ve tried to figure out this cohabitation thing — we’re human, after all, and at our, ahem, somewhat advanced stage of life, we’re both very set in our respective ways — but overall, it’s been a unquestionably good thing. (I’ll also stipulate that it’s long, long overdue — I’m embarrassed to admit publicly just how long we’ve been a couple without taking the big step forward of sharing quarters — and that the delay was almost entirely my fault.) The Hawaii trip wasn’t bad either, except in the sense of bad timing, coming as it did mere days after my health problems were revealed, as well as taking place under some somewhat odd circumstances. (I really ought to write about this whole experience as well; it wasn’t just Anne’s folks we were traveling with, but an entire busload of senior citizens from their community, a social club known as the “Senior Circle.” Needless to say, this trip was quite a bit different from my usual way of traveling.) And even the revelations about my health, as shocking and depressing as they were, ultimately had a silver lining because the steps I’ve taken to avoid having a stroke have also left me looking and feeling a lot better than I have in years, and who can complain about that? (Well, it is kind of a drag to find that many of my favorite clothes are now too big for me, but given a choice between a beloved concert t-shirt and not having a stroke, guess which one wins?)
The thing about these events that made them so traumatic is that they all felt so… mature. They were Grown-Up Things. The sort of Very Grown-Up Things that only a real Grown-Up would face, or would be expected to face, or could effectively deal with. And being a grown-up is something I’ve frankly never been very comfortable with. The sad truth is I’ve spent decades trying to ignore the inescapable reality that I am an adult, and sooner or later, I was always going to have to face adult concerns and responsibilities. However, health problems, suddenly grokking that your parents are getting old, moving forward with a relationship… hell, even going on a cruise instead of a half-assed, spur-of-the-moment road trip… it was like I’d suddenly been promoted to a higher level than I’d been playing at previously. That would’ve been pretty unsettling if it only happened once in any given year, but for all of these things to happen in that timeframe? And many of them within only one month? That’s where the trauma comes in.
I’ve done a lot of thinking since all this started, and the one point I keep coming back to is that I’ve wasted a huge amount of time waiting for my life to begin. You know, that syndrome where you keep saying, someday I’ll do this; when I get my shit together, I’ll do that; one of these days when I grow up… And of course the sad irony is that my life was in fact already underway, whether I understood that or not. I did understand it, in an intellectual sense at least, but I don’t think I really, truly believed it. I didn’t want to, because being a grown-up and having a life — no, making a life — is bloody hard work, man, and I just wanted to play as long as I could. But then came the morning my doctor clapped his hand on my shoulder and said, “You’re a ticking time-bomb, man.” At that moment, suddenly I got it. This is it, and everything I’ve done (or not done) has consequences, and I’ve reached the age where those consequences are becoming apparent.
The consequences are these: I’m not the man I used to think I was, or was going to be by this point in my life. I’m not a globetrotting adventurer, and I’m not a bestselling novelist. I’m not especially tough, and I’m a hell of a long way from self-reliant or self-confident. I’m not any of the things I always just kind of assumed I would naturally evolve into. (Yes, I know how naive and ridiculous that sounds; that’s basically the point I’m trying to make here.) What I am is inescapably, irrefutably middle-aged, halfway through the marathon, a bit run down and neglected, and as a result, in need of a lot of renovation work. I’m broken in quite a few significant ways. I get my feelings hurt easily and I worry too much about what others think of me. And I’ve made a crapload of mistakes, not the least of which is refusing to make choices because I was so afraid of making the wrong one and becoming trapped in a place I would later decide I didn’t want to be. I think I have a fair shot of repairing or undoing some of these mistakes. But a lot of them are done deals, written in stone. It is what it is, as my man Rick would say. And somehow I’ve got to learn to live with the frustration and shame and self-recrimination that comes with realizing you’ve been a real dolt, and there’s very little you can do about it now.
I’ve been fretting about indecision and aging and “what I’m going to be when I grow up” for a long time. But during this past year, these things took on a new solidity and urgency. Because… this is it, man. This is my life.
So, yeah, 2012… it was quite a year.
