“Out there the world is immense and sudden.”
— Jason Molina.
Every day now, I seem to fall more and more away from feeling like I’m going to understand. It is coming to pass that I’m never going to get it. The world. The people. The endless cosmos spread out over the yards and the towns. Red clay dog shit spread out all over the middle of the summer sidewalk. Sneaker prints perfectly imprinted in the awfulness. Didn’t that person fucking see that lump of shit laying there? It was in the middle of the sidewalk. How do we explain these things/ or anything for that matter? Everything is so much more ridiculous than we wanted to think it could be. All the people are so much more immature than we pretend.
Ah, but time marches on, as they say, and what’s a humbled fellow like me to do? I’ve got to adjust my focuses, I tell myself. I’ve got to reconfigure my chakras, you know? When I turn to the real world, there is arrogance and hot physical heat. When I turn to the online world, there is egotism and empathy I no longer buy. Which is worse for me? Which is best?
Where do I begin? When do I quit? I’ve traveled the world and the seven seas, everybody is looking for something. Look, I have no tattoos on my skin. None.
And think what you want but one thing is for sure. The lack of ink means I’m not following the crowd. It means I’m running from it, homie.
Running like hell.
_____
Once upon a time, on the banks of my buddy’s bass pond, me and Arle got married. It was five years ago this past week, a sultry evening in the middle of the last summer before Covid-19 came along. I guess I could nail a little innocence to the old totem pole here if I wanted to/ attach that angle that says: we had no idea that the world would change so much so soon for so many. Including us. But I don’t feel the driving need to do it. Our existence, me and Arle, our five kids, it was plowing forward according to fate or luck/ according to soul (if you have it/ most do not). Looking back now, regardless of whether a pandemic came or didn’t, it seems goofy to me to draw that ‘before and after’ line in our love story. But still: it is there anyway. And to be honest, it’s not even remotely close to being the deepest, most intense ‘before and after’ line in our story. That came soon after our wedding when we wrestled our own lives out of the hands of others. People don’t like when you do that. People did not like when I did that. But I did. We did. And it has meant everything.
_____
At the pond that evening, on the outskirts of this very small country town out here in Central Pennsylvania, thunder clouds dragged across the sky and threatened us. Like any summer night in July, everything might come crashing down at any second. And if it does it will bring natural intensity. Potential calamity, even. But it will not mind you and your little country wedding. Were the bottom to fall out and the clouds collapse from within, we would have had to either ride it out or hide in the barn or head home to try another day.
I suspect, at that point, we would have stood out there on the tempest in the wildest of lightning. That’s how sure and ready we were. Unlike when I was younger, marriage now was not some whimsical vision, some spontaneous act in the name of trying to prove things that can never be proven with impetuous energy. Rather, the act of sanctifying the union itself, if you will, that had been forged over years/ across many fields of glass. What we were- and what we hoped to continue to become- faced many tests up until that moment there on the dried grass on the slow rise hill on the north bank of that half acre-sized watering hole. Which is how love should unfold, I guess. It doesn’t need to be electrified to the point of swept away like drugs. Passion and curiosity are easy to misunderstand, or worse, misappropriate. And so a lot of love stories end up being anything but. They begin to burn up even as the vows are being said. And when you maybe live through something like that, it hurts you or it changes you or it beats you down to this point where you continually blame yourself for all the little things that came and went.
By design, even, there are love stories that were born to die. Tangled tales, you see, carefully curated for the sole purpose of someday being entirely demolished. Killed, some are, by impossible storms wearing delicate blues. I’m not saying that this happened to me. But I am saying that I just wrote that for you to read and ponder as we share this time together.
It was five years ago this past week that I looked into Arle’s eyes and began to understand that sometimes salvation arrives in the form of a subtle sense that trickles through your gut/ shoots out into your blood/ and ultimately floods your heart with a feeling so powerful and real and true that all you can do is stand back/ in awe of yourself/ as you begin to set out across this goddamn burnt out landscape we call life/ holding hands now/ with a person who takes your deepest breaths away.
If you laugh at love and marriage because you suspect that you are above it all: then you are probably a damn fool. And in the end, you’ll prove it, by and by, over and over, no matter what you pretend in public.
_____
Now it is different. I have my things and they are immense, let me start with that. Trying not to mince words too much, I will tell you that I have some very real and very prominent mental health struggles at times. I’m not saying that to hashtag myself or brand myself in the spirit of the modern TikTok either. Nothing against anyone else talking about this stuff at all. In fact, I salute you. Or most of you anyways. Yet trying to tell your own story without spilling the beans on the miasma you walk around in because you are a polluted city is not only cheap and lame, it’s also diabolically bad for your own personal growth. And by personal growth, I’m talking basic good things that are only now just coming to light in terms of what’s good for us.
Real accountability is legendary, brave, and repairing. Honest accountability is rare as hell and ethically beautiful. True accountability means having to be honest about your own shortcomings, and that is difficult and rare. Well-intentioned accountability revolves around the lost art of being able to point a finger at another, but also at yourself as well. In my experience, people would rather fight across an entire lifetime rather than admit they have been part of the problem all along.
Accountability, the kind that doesn’t belong to canceled celebrities trying to save their careers or whatever, it is the only kind that interests me. It lives in the scrappy woodlots of our untold stories. It is hidden from the world. Everything is, mostly.
It is there though. Accountability. Like a homeless person eating sweet drippy apricots from a can they punctured with a Rambo knife. We can all pretend the woods are simply woods, but that’s bullshit. They are much more than that. There is a galaxy unfolding in there, whether we even know it or not. Something being born back in those shady lanes, whether we ever actually admit it or not.
_____
Arle has taught me, and continues to teach me, on an everyday basis, that accountability is, in many ways, everything. If you refute it/ pass the buck/ persistently hone your craft so that you never have to be accountable except for small false flags you plant along the way to save face (Look! I DID admit to being hangry sometimes!), then you are practicing one of the worst dark arts imaginable. Just turn your TV on. Walk out into the Facebook arena for just a few minutes, you’ll see what I mean. Human beings are spending more and more of their time and energy finding ways to say: it’s not my fault.
At the same time though, and this is where things get really tricky, we all have to be able to recognize when we are being taken for a ride by people we trusted. It happens more than we think. People who supposedly care about us are often the most likely to spin a long and winding web of abuse against us. Everything from false accusations to gaslighting to exploiting your name to others in an attempt to convince whoever is willing to listen that the ‘other person’ is the awful one who is actually the one doing all the damage around here.
And although it causes immense damage to the pysche of victims, people who have been taught that certain simple statements are gospel and should never ever be questioned, statements like ‘Family is everything’ or ‘Always respect your parents’ or “They are your *insert title here*” among many, are the kinds of people who end up remaining in drastically unhealthy family relationships and marriages and friendships simply because they have been programmed/ totally and completely/ to think that any recognition that something is wrong within the connection simply MUST be shut down in the name of what’s “right”. In the name, if you will, of what we’ve been told all along.
_____
This shit happened to me.
I share this much because I know how deeply it has traumatized me in the end. I walk around quite damaged by a story I keep inside me.
I was told all across my life that it was my ‘temper’ that was always the problem. People I loved and trusted were able to manipulate me for years and years and years by insisting just that one thing. And I had no clue what was happening. How could I know? How does a grown man understand the inner workings of the minds of others. Their behavior towards me came in the form of persistently pushing their narrative on me, and refuting mine, until a surefire pattern happened.
First: they disallowed my narrative to exist in the court of reality. People who suffer certain mental disorders are very prone to adopt this tactic. Then: when they wore me down, backed me up, and seemingly got their way yet again, I protested with increasingly futile distress. It was always reaction fueled by my own inability to understand why this was happening. And how. I had to ask myself over and over again: How could I always be dismissed as being unreasonable or just plain wrong when I was a pretty intelligent and caring person?!?!
But guess what? As it often turns out with certain kinds of people, this was exactly what they planned all along. You know why? It’s pretty easy to understand once you’ve finally seen the light. After I was backed up to the cliff by the refusal of my own perspectives and my own opinions, I would react in panic with yelling and ‘explosive’ behavior.
This in turn, I would be told, point blank, scared the person who was actually playing me for their own benefit all along.
I had no idea at the time, across years what was going on, but it was emotional abuse.
And it still is.
_____
I’m no psychologist, of course, so please remember that when I reflect upon things in that light. That said, psychological/ emotional abuse is, I suspect, often carried out by people who likely don’t even know they are doing it. People whose own set of childhood experiences (or whatever happened) had been marinating in their own twisted juices for decades. What sucks the most is the fact that, even unconsciously, all abusers find this pattern to be irresistible over time, to the point that no matter what a victim like me says or does, the abusers walk tall and confident in their own knowledge that all they have to do is push and push, a little here, a little there/ nothing too obvious that others would sense/ a thousand paper cuts over time/ and eventually the ‘angry’ person with the ‘problem’ will eventually feel cornered, confused, and desperate and… ta-dah… react by exhibiting the overt signs of being deeply troubled and upset by things they don’t even really understand.
Then all will be right with the world, you know? Because everyone agrees that overtly upset people are just fucked up in the head, you know?
Am I right?
What I experienced for a long time was gaslighting at its finest. I didn’t know the term back then, and today it gets thrown around, often out of context, but looking back, after years in therapy and pondering, it turned out to be the precise term when I finally ran into it. Others would often capitalize on the fact that I did not have the tools in my toolbox to merely hold my own in a discussion in which people were refusing to consider my feelings at all. So, right on cue, I would become really frustrated. Sadness would blow up in me and I would cave to the lifelong behavior that I learned in childhood from people very close to me.
That behavior was frustration and upset that lead to yelling at times, cursing and telling people to get the fuck out of my house. So, what happens then? If you tell someone to get the fuck out of your house because you’re really brokenhearted that they won’t listen to you and you cannot seem to wrap your head around what to do in order to convince them to at least try, and you end up agitated and in a state of emotional distress, you are simply handling them the “get out of jail free” card. You are handing them the excuse they need to be able to blame you like they did the last time, and the time before that. Look how ‘angry’ of a person you are! Even if 99% of your life is not spent in anger, if you tell someone to get the fuck out of your house, that’s how they view you. That’s how they want others to view you. You have offended them and you have questioned something they don’t want to back away from and they sure as hell don’t want to pull up to the curb of having a good, hard, honest look at themselves.
The other day, my 10-year-old told me that it’s okay to be angry sometimes. I almost cried when I heard him say it. Coming from his beautiful face, it felt like a validation sent from the cosmos. Of course, he has no idea about any of this stuff, nor do I want him to, but sometimes righteousness finds you, taps you on the shoulder and says please don’t back down.
_____
“Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Bach, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.”
— Charles Bukowski
_____
Some sorts would much rather congregate with others who, like them, all point at a scapegoat as the problem. It feels so good to be able to stand with others and say, It’s not me! It’s not us! It’s that motherfucker right there!
It’s like ‘Boogeyman Phenomenon’ always sneaking around the world like a bad kitchen draft. In that one, certain political entities understand that if they continually insist that immigrants (or Jews or Muslims or whoever) are the source of all of your problems, many of you will look at the person standing next to you and see them staring back at you with that lightly raised eyebrow that has long been man’s downfall and before long the two of you will feel united over hating the boogeyman.
Even if the boogeyman you’re now united against never did shit to either of you.
_____
After Arle and I got married and we began, or continued really, to recognize long installed patterns that were working our attempts at simply living a peaceful regular life as a newly married couple with a blended family, not one person ever asked me why I was upset. It remains unfathomable to me, that painful reality.
Not a single person in my world.
No one wanted to take the time to ask
No one wanted to hear.
And look, even when I have to admit I still had no real clarity of insight, even when I still couldn’t even begin to explain myself, the fact remains, despite all that, one thing that was clear was that I absolutely knew that something was incredibly ‘off’. Something was terribly off about how others were treating me. How they whispered behind my back and congregated together and left me out as they bonded together, blaming me for their own inexcusable behaviors and actions and words.
Grrrr.
In making me their legendary boogeyman, I was left staggered by the sense of abandonment.
I guess, without ever realizing it, abandonment had affected me as a kid. My dad leaving had been something I survived okay, but had never processed at all. No one asked me about it. No one urged me to talk about my feelings. It was the opposite. No one said anything about it at all. He left and that was that. Carry on, boys. Carry on.
But the abandonment that came in the wake of my marriage to Arle hurt me a trillion times more than my dad’s leaving so long ago. Here I was, the same guy, the same person, being forced to choose between my own reality or the one that others I once trusted were heaving at me. I chose me. I chose me and Arle. I don’t regret it either. But being forced to choose has destroyed me in ways that are never coming back.
_____
Over the years, right across my recent adulthood, the pattern solidified to where even ultra-dysfunctional alcoholics and physical abusers and other officially diagnosed mentally ill people could basically own me simply by doing this.
We do what we want.
We wait for him to break in half.
Then we point our fingers at the one displaying obvious emotional agony.
Then we say we are scared of him.
Then we feel like winners.
_____
Some accountability from me. Here. Now.
It took me so fucking long, man. It took me most of my life really, to come to terms with what was happening. YES: I was absolutely guilty of being a real over-the-top pain in the ass at times with people I loved. YES: I had anxiety issues that were rooted in my years as a kid. A lot of physical abuse. A dad who abandoned me and my brother at the exact moment when kids need a dad most. Living with chronic alcoholics. Residing with my grandparents for years and watching the mental abuse my grandfather heaved on my grandmother as if it was regular everyday behavior. YES: I was a walking witch’s cauldron of unaddressed voids and towering insecurities. YES: according to many modern psychology fortune cookies, I was probably nowhere near ready to be in a romantic relationship with another human being when I first started in on having them.
YES.YES.YES.YES.YES. I take accountability for my many, many shortcomings. I take responsibility for my innate humanity. Imperfect from birth, I sheepishly (but bravely?) raise my hand when they ask, “Anybody here ever fuck things up at all?”
But ultimately, there was so much more for me to fathom. I had been groomed over a long stretch of time to blame myself/ to take all the burden of every single argument, every strange scenario in which others I trusted were insistent that they were right and I was wrong. In order to survive and maintain certain so-called ‘relationships’ with people I couldn’t imagine breaking up with (family or partners) I had to accept the way things were. In their narrative, I was at fault for everything. No one else, and I mean no one else involved in any of this life-altering situation ever took any accountability for anything.
Never.
Ever.
_____
How the hell did that happen?
_____
What brazen/ arrogant/ cruelty it is to deflect onto another with such dedicated energy.
So that just forcing them to play the game itself just bashes their soul away.
_____
But isn’t that what I’m doing right here?
No. It is not.
I am flawed, but honorable.
I am hurt, but honorable.
I am sad, but honorable.
I am fading, but honorably.
_____
Validation for me- and for any and all victims of serious mental abuse- lies in the solid light fist bumps from others who both understand and are willing to admit it.
_____
“But hurry, let’s entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.”
— Federico Garcia Lorca
To read the rest of this essay and more from Serge Bielanko, subscribe to his Substack feed HERE.
• • •
Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
