All around me fires are bursting up and obliterating love. My country is at war with itself. My inner artist is feeling happy and buoyant, and money is an issue.

The stress of the world shows up in our lives, too.

How can two people navigate a relationship while the fires have not been put out? Forgive the damage and move on.

Underneath the anger and fear is always sadness. Rage is not a safe input or output for humans. At least, not humans that want to stay connected. Many of us learned how to become disconnected. Protective. Dissociate from the pain of our family life, our marriages, our work family. We’ve all learned how to check out.

How do we check back in? How can we shorten the time between [what did you just say?] and [how can I help]? When we are in distress, it is hard to keep our hearts and minds aligned. Often we get triggered (we all do, btw) and escape into the void, the daydream, the stares into the distance.

When two lovers cannot look in each other’s eyes, it is a good idea to address the fracture, give the shut-down person time to recover their own sense of self, then a repair can begin. If we try a shortcut, it fails.

I’m sorry, delivered too soon, cannot be heard. The void is still in control. Listening is limited. Fear, sadness, and loneliness creep in. Occasionally, anger is an attempt to redirect the slide away from the darkness of isolation and pain. Holding a hand, when the person is ready, well, that helps. It still may not give the hurt person the time they need to sort through.

Disconnected individuals have to learn a recovery path for themselves. Once shut down, only their self-reflection and self-soothing can bring them back. Even a loving partner can be a threat when anxiety is in charge.

What do we do?

Pause. Give space. Quiet. Lack of threat or input of any kind. Our missing partner needs to sort through their own experiences. Separate the past partners, past family members, or past bosses who hurt them or treated them unfairly.

Pause.

When someone get’s shutdown, it is up to them to recover, return, and ask for the repair. That’s how taking responsibility for one’s own bullshit looks.

I’m sorry I got mad. I’m sorry I shut down.

If their partner is not ready to rejoin the conversation, the repair effort will be one-sided. You cannot have a partnership, a repair, or a relationship that is one-sided. Balance and mutual respect are the goals.

Imbalance causes fatigue. Stress.

I seek peace. Cats. And ocean air. Those things I can have alone. I want to find my person. Feel what home feels like again. I do have a house, but it’s missing an essential element. Skin-to-skin connection with my person. Find a home again within a loving partnership.

There are barriers to entry. A partner who is not ready. A prior relationship of trauma or abandonment. Selecting a future partner who is actually unavailable. Emotional awareness these days is a rare skill. A practiced skill of being able to connect on a deep emotional level, in ways that unlock some spiritual bonding. I have touched that, but only briefly.

My original teacher for emotional connection and unconditional love, was my sister, who was ten when I was born. I became her living doll. She embraced the best of the hippie aesthetic. She mothered me more than my mother could’ve. Mom was busy trying to save her marriage to a racing alcoholic. She didn’t really have time for me, personally, until after she divorced my father, and the two of us, picked up the pieces together.

I was left alone with her as threats of violence escalated. My other two siblings, a brother 8 years older, and a sister 6 years older, were both out of the house at boarding school when the shit started getting really heavy. I was alone in the house with my mom. My dad continued to spiral into an narcistic alcoholic death march.

He had everything. He felt very little. He drank before he got home from work. As my mom would tell you, she gave him an ultimatum. Me or the bottle.

The gloves came off with that one. Yelling. Thrown objects. Threats.

I built forts in the woods. I would escape when the threat of violence reached a crescendo in the glass house by the lake. After the other kids went off to school, I was alone with a mad devil and a fearful mom.

A memory returns, not quite as reliable as I would hope, more of an epic dream. My dad had moved out. He got a fancy apartment/condo at the top of a building near the university. Cambridge Towers. When I visited him, my best friend and I would make paper airplanes and paper helicopters and fly them off the 20th-floor balcony toward the football stadium in the distance.

“The Most Beautiful Girl” by Charlie Pride had become my dad’s anthem as he continued to drink himself into oblivion in his high-rise tower of loss and regret.

“I’m coming home,” he said one night, when I was sleeping over.

This is the part that feels surreal.

“I’m doing it for you, buddy.”

No, no, no, no, no. My father, the alcoholic, did not have any emotional awareness. Drinking, he also had no consideration of how his actions might affect others. I’m sure I responded with joy. I don’t remember much about the moment. I would sleep in the king-sized bed with my dad. The top floors of the tower had very high ceilings and long flowing gauze-like curtains blowing lazily in the opening of the sliding glass door opening to the balcony.

What’s the name for that feeling, when you’re near a high place, an edge, and your brain sort of tells you to jump? I don’t remember.

His return to the house on the lake lasted about three weeks. I have no memory of this time. My one remaining sibling, my other sister, has a few more concrete memories of our father’s return.

Mom fled the house with my favorite sister, and they traveled to Mexico. My sister said she had to pack her own trunk for summer camp that year, and it was hard and frightening.

By this time, we had live-in help. A wonderful woman, who later became a licensed psychologist and my mom’s best friend, Josie. Her husband did maintenance around the property. It was a big property. There were always projects.

After that defeat, my dad moved into the ground-floor of an apartment building he owned. He invested in apartments so he could write off the losses to offset the income tax, which was around 65% for someone making that much money.

That summer, I spent the night with my father only once. He took me to Laguna Gloria Austin’s FIESTA. An art party, with music, and a very active beer garden. At nine, they closed the party. The “drinkers” still in the beer garden were asked to finish up and head home. The ones with money bribed the help to stay longer.

A group of us kids were spralled out in a field behind the beer garden, waiting for our ride home.

My dad, finally emerged. “Let’s go, sport.” We hopped in his Mercedes convertible and I was frightened immediately when he had a hard time getting out of the parking lot. He was smashed.

I began praying without ceasing. Please god, let me get home. Protect us. Give us grace.

A block from his apartment complex, my dad plowed through a small mailbox and up into a neighboring house’s yard. I promised my “little John” that I wouldn’t ever get in the car with my dad again.

Turns out, he’d met a young woman, also an enthusiast of the spirits, who would marry him for the money and the booze a few months later. It was a huge controversy. My dad paid off the judge and got married before his divorce from my mother was finalized.

It’s been hard for me to get close to the memory, or ghost, of my father. I can understand some of his pain. Perhaps he, too, was a bit bipolar. At various points along his life journey from that time forward, I know he suffered from tremendous regret. His wife was young. Liked to drink. She was not a nice person. Even to my dad. She was the definition of gold digger. She didn’t get to enjoy the fruits of her labor. Only a few years after my dad died, she was pitched off one of the balconies of my dad’s new mansion on the mountain above Austin.

I sent an anonymous letter to the police. Telling them of her lover, the guns and cars dealer, Rod Leyman. We will never know. We all knew.

In my current moment, I understand how the image of the cat door ocean brings me hope. The cat appears to be alone staring into the ocean. There is a chair. A lazy afternoon in Italy or Greece, perhaps.

I have the cats, Sid and Hunter. Love is provided.

I have the door. I can leave at any time, move about the planet, seek my next perch or plateau.

I long for the ocean.

What I learned in the last few years of being single, I do want a partner.

I can create a happy life alone. Content. Creative time unlimited. Sleep, eat, play routines all flexible to my whims.

I do not want to be alone with cats, nor by the ocean, or here in Austin, Texas, in my cul-de-sac of modest delight.

A famous writer said last night how he had achieved his success as an author. “I am a hard worker.” And even though he has many books and many awards, he’s still a college professor, because there are very few rockstars of novel writing. Even though he is a rockstar novelist, people are not buying books these days. They are too busy with TikTok and sculpting their bodies while acquiring wealth and branded athletic-leisure wear.

Even the rockstar novelist of our modern age has a day job. The 500-seat theater was sold out last night.

As Kurt Vonnegut would say, “Ho hum.”

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