Well, this has been a particularly horrid day. No sleep last night due to wind and rain (bands from Hurricane Rita). No sleep led to more seizures. More seizures led to reliving horrible things in my past. Friends dyeing in my arms, blood everywhere, that sort of dandy Army memory - then Lisa stuff. People I don't know trying to kill me, then a person I loved with all my heart wanting to do the same. Just have to love those seizures! I just wanted someone to hold me, but there is no one here. I can see my whole life I have just wanted someone to hold me. Thanks mom...

So early on I decided to make a tough day worse and worked some more in my Adoption Healing book. Wow, what a catastrophic mistake! I was probably just too wiped out to realize what I was doing. From the book, "In terms of fear of abandonment, the average adoptee can feel rejected by a street lamp. The fear of abandonment is so ingrained in the adoptee's personality that it can show up for no apparent reason."

And then a reason shows up. Today I lost my best and only real friend here on the beach, a man I trusted and admired more than any other. I have given so much to him over the last year because his marriage gave hope to all the dreams I had shattered in my own - and I needed so much to believe that true love does exist. Somehow his perfect wife thought I was after her man! How in Jehovah's name did I send that signal? Paint me shocked and speechless. I must be completely stupid.

From Adoption Healing again;

"Because they suffered the trauma of the separation from their birthmothers, it is very common for adoptees to navigate their lives by walking on a tightrope that they cannot see. As is common with trauma victims, the adoptee often feels like the initial trauma is going to happen again. After all, it happened once and she knows not why. To protect herself, she walks the tightrope. But, where does she put her foot next? She thinks and she 'knows' she caused the initial disaster, but not how she caused it. She asks herself what she did wrong and how can she avoid doing it again? She must conduct her life in a manner to avoid doing it again."

Well, today I fell off the damn rope again. AND IT HURTS PLENTY I CAN TELL YOU. I lost my friend and all I can think of is what I did wrong. I want to believe it wasn't my fault, but I sure feel like it is. Every time I lose someone I care about, I feel it is my fault - that I have somehow "done it again" and caused yet another cherished soul to run away from me. The book says I should be focusing on feeling the emotions, but my mind just wants to analyze the thing and figure out exactly what I could have done better so it won't ever happen again. That and try to figure out what can I possibly do to fix this mess so everyone can be happy. I just feel this whole thing is some gigantic misunderstanding that should be fixed so everyone can be blissfully happy again. Brutal experience has already taught me the fallacy of those thoughts, and yet I still have them. Why? Why is it my job to fix anything?

I feel like my life has been a series of letting go of those I care most about. Usually I just let them go and move on myself. Someone told me once that true love was worth fighting any battle for - even unto death. So I fought hard to keep Lisa in my life, and lost both myself and her in the process. In the end, I was so focused on working through my own pain that I did not even see hers. And when I got through my pain to the other side, and was ready to give her anything/everything she ever wanted and needed - she was already getting all that from someone else who didn't have to do any of the work.. Now I am confused. Was I fighting for love, or was I fighting to not be abandoned? Well, anyway I am done with fighting. If they want to leave, they can leave. Goodbye my friend, I am sorry I failed you.

I am so tired of being in my own head. So tired of analyzing my feelings. So tired of feeling them. I can see why we adoptees just stuff it all inside. Focusing on me seems so completely narcissistic, and frankly it is more fun to see the rest of the world than it is to look in a dark mirror. Emotions are incredibly strong, and completely uncontrollable (at least for me). I am not even sure which emotions I am feeling (actually, I just had a flash of Spock in the Star Trek episode where he was consumed by emotion - I feel like that really. Crap, am I really an emotionless, logical Vulcan?) The Adoption Healing book says I am probably feeling all of my emotions at once, because I never learned how to separate them;

"At the core of the adoptees emotions is a giant ball of intertwined, indistinguishable feelings. These feelings terrorize the adoptee because they are so pervasive and interwoven, difficult to separate into individual feelings like pain, anger and sadness. The adoptee may feel like she is experiencing 17 different feelings at the same time and she won't be able to recognize the individual feelings because they are intertwined, and experiencing the feelings all at once is just too much for anyone to handle."

It feels like that may be true. Like one trigger (losing a friend) turns into all the pain I have suffered in my entire life at once. I want to just stuff it back inside, but I am determined to get through this and become a "real boy" so I am going to spend tonight (and however long it takes) picking through this agonizing knot of pain and sadness and trying to get some idea of what is really there. I am going to look at each and every feeling and try to figure out just what it is. It is here now, for good or bad. I am going to use this opportunity, no matter how painful or frightening, to try to move ahead. I am not a little bit afraid.

Another week of "Adoption Healing" by Joe Soll. It was a difficult week, the emotions this workbook bring out are at many times completely overwhelming. Apparently, everything that could possibly have been done wrong in raising me WAS done wrong (unintentionally I am certain, but back then nobody knew) - resulting in my adoption experience being quite traumatic.

So, working through this is even harder than I had initially hoped. I am really unsure of who I am right now. I have realized that the person I have become was initially a construct meant to please my adopted parents. When that failed, I just was stuck in it. So now I am having to do some hard soul searching. Much of what I have developed over the years has to be me, but separating that from the construct is not as easy as it may seem to be.

For instance, I know the water is ME. Sailing, swimming, surfing, canoeing. And the drive to explore is me too. No Hassel's were ever Buddhists either. And let's not forget vegetarianism! Neither of my adopted parents - indeed nobody in either of their family history - have any of those characteristics. So I start there. I am a gypsy of the sea, a Buddhist & vegetarian, an explorer, an archaeologist at heart. But what else? Is my morality mine or theirs? My thought process? And there is a lot more.

I figured I would do the workbook and be on my way to a happier life lickety-split. OK, I AM actually on my way to a happier life, but not in the way I envisioned. I can see already (half way through the book) that I am going to HAVE to find my birth-mother. I will never have closure otherwise. This could really effect my world sailing plans. Oh well.

I am having difficulty picking the damn book up lately. There are so many emotions that completely consume me every chapter, even every page. It is quite unlike any experience I have ever had. I have joked for years that I have been shot, stabbed, blown up and gassed (which indeed I have). But this is much worse than all of that. Apparently I have learned how to stuff emotions since abandonment, and now I am letting them out of their cave. Eeek.

Is this how others live? Emotions everywhere, all the time? I am not equipped for this, truly. I am good at escaping though, so I went to Orlando for the weekend. Had a nice time with my buddy Ken, and on my way back to the dive hotel I stay in on I-Drive I found a place that has latin dancing Saturday night. I sure love to dance (and latin most of all) and I am getting good enough that even the Puerto Rican girls are approaching me to dance with them. So I had a blast.

And on Sunday I found a great vegetarian restaurant and made some new friends there too. So I got to get out of my head for a while this weekend anyway. But now I am back at the grind. It is raining here today, and I got rid of the Jeep and only have the bike now so I am stuck on the boat. No excuse but to do more workbook...