I Think I've Been Here Before

Yes, I know I have.

I think I’ve been here before.

Yes, I know I have.

A time when the days are in turmoil and the nights, terrible. Never knowing when the turmoil will descend – but knowing for sure that it will – sometime – soon.

Never able to be sure that the tranquility of this moment will survive the next.

Never able to feel comfort knowing that the one meant by nature to nurture and protect, will not, again this time, morph into nemesis.

Never able to plan for tomorrow since yesterday’s plan for today flamed to ashes in an instant.

Knowing always the fear that the fear will return, a fear more fearsome than the fear itself – a lurking constant, even when the cause for the fear itself has taken a temporary break.

As the son of an active (sometimes raging) alcoholic, I’ve been here before; and for all my bravado of maturity and survival, it’s as though I’m five or six or ten again – and back in that time of fear and chaos, which I foolishly tried to believe I’d left behind (but in my heart of hearts knew that, really, I hadn’t).

The alcoholic father is now long dead, and I’ve had decades to attempt understanding, even forgiving, that it was the disease of alcoholism, the demon whisky, and not a demon in the man, that thrust me, even now sometimes thrusts me back, into those cold nights of terror under ominous stars. Reaching understanding, forgiveness, should be easier for me, an alcoholic myself – but it isn’t, when the terrors are back.

And the terrors are back. They may never really have gone away, completely. (No, they didn’t.) And now they’re back, bigly: insecure days, sleepless nights, constant anxiety, periodic panic.

But it’s not the alcoholic father, and his disease of alcoholism (and the demon whisky) that have brought them back so fiercely this time. This time it’s our President.

I know I’ll sound pathetically infantile when I say it, but most of us have been raised from birth to believe that the President is the Father of our Country. Yes, George Washington specifically – a man with flaws for sure, but also virtues. With the Father/Country thing as with so much else related to our civic selves, Washington set a precedent that lived after him and encompassed his successor-Presidents, and the rest of us, his civic descendants. Even when we didn’t agree completely with his politics, we felt in our guts – most of us – that our President had our best interest at heart, that he was looking out for us, looking to protect us as best he could. Not always succeeding at it, but trying to. It’s what fathers do, the natural thing, fathers of sons and daughters, and fathers of countries too.

Call me naïve (likely some of you have already called me infantile), but I think that most of them did try; and sometimes they succeeded.

But with this President? The chaos seems to be the point, the terrible cold nights under sinister stars, inevitable. It takes me back.

This assessment will not surprise most of you. Others have noted as much, a million different ways by now. For months I, and others, have been sunk in paralyzing despair, lying awake nights in cold sweats, looking up at those frigging stars (metaphorically anyway).

So taking note is only the first step, and I may not even have taken it fully yet – an infantile baby half-step. Many steps to go. I think back to that time when I was at this place before, try to believe that there’s some disease at work, and not some demon too, try to remember how I survived it then.

But it’s hard. I may not have learned much about surviving in that earlier time except survival, and even that may have been just accident, just gritting through, not knowing there was anything else a scared kid could do.

Now, of course, I’m old and wise. I’m a functional adult who’s seen many troubles through the decades, had much therapy. I know how to cope with it all now, how to go on living through the depths of it, how to come out on the other side. In fact, I put a picture of me coping up above. I’ll put it in again here at the end, just to reinforce the point. I’ve been here before, and I survived. I’ll survive again this time too – and so can you. MAYBE!