It has now been a year since I last saw my wife and kids, and I only know a little more than I knew 11 months ago:
- Tori has made a calculated move to stay very hidden from both me and the authorities: I know nobody who knows where her, Victor or Mia are.
- Tori is making a bad decision to keep our kids from interacting with me, and it would be illegal if I reported it, so I haven’t yet.
- I have no idea if this concealment driven by the fear of the government, an unclear fear of me, or she has been lying and is afraid of being found out.
- I have to carefully act in a way that preserves the first possibility (afraid of the government) but also protects against the latter (lying to protect herself).
I am off probation October 22nd, and a few weeks of bureaucracy later the event itself that created this circumstance will have never legally happened. From that point, the truth will slowly unveil over Tori’s intentions, and I intend to take action by Thanksgiving if nothing changes.
In the meantime, I have accepted that I can’t do anything about it. If my wife is still my friend, I look forward to a future point where we can both put our sins behind us and seek a better relationship. While I don’t want to dwell on it, if she refuses to release what has happened and double-down on more sin, God will be my deliverance.
What I’m Feeling
The nature of feelings is represented in the chronology of awareness. All sorts of things could be happening to Tori, Victor, or Mia, but I won’t know about those things until I am informed, and then at that point I will feel something.
What I have had in this past year has been tremendous uncertainty. After the speculation and wishful thinking died down, all I have is the emptiness of non-involvement. In some ways, it has been a measure of Tori’s silent treatment that contributed to these events, but magnified to atypical levels.
In uncertainty, our natural tendency is to seek the “known”, and is the reason we have historically created and worshiped idols, and is the same mechanism that propels just about everyone into some substance or another.
But, God asks something else of us. The following is a non-exhaustive TLDR of most of the book of Psalms:
- God, You are holy, good, perfect, powerful, and capable.
- Please destroy my enemies, who really really suck.
- I know you are faithful, no matter what.
The Psalms in particular have always been difficult for me. My substance in question has always been in certainty: if I know something I can feel safe that it is a known thing. I could excuse it as a narcissistic abuse survivor, but it’s not a spiritually healthy thing. God wants us to be certain in Him and His nature, and that’s all that’s necessary.
Unlike work, crack cocaine or church events, however, this solidarity in God’s faithfulness doesn’t change the emotions as they fly by. We are required to confront them, acknowledge them, and let them pass. There isn’t much room for dysregulation in the God’s kingdom, which itself is its own form of idolatry.
Today is a very sad day for me, as I am reminded of the absence of the three most important people in my life. I don’t even have the privilege of closure that would come with death.
But, it’s impossible to live in perpetual sadness and sorrow. No matter how sad you are, the trash won’t take itself out and the cat won’t feed itself. Plus, grief itself is another addictive substance.
I can’t vouch for Tori’s side of this situation, but God has made it a blessing for me. I have found the ability to cry, which victims of post-traumatic childhood stress don’t usually have the luxury to experience.
If I had had that release over a year ago (along with the education and understanding I’ve received since then), it’s a high likelihood the event that created my present exile from the most important people in my life wouldn’t have happened. Of course, it’s a good chance I wouldn’t have learned what I needed to learn without this trauma, so this situation is probably the most ideal.
And, irrespective of what happens, I know God has control of the situation. I also expect, God-willing, that things will change in some fashion within the next two months.
What I’ve Learned
If a factory produces a defective product, the first order of business would be to shut it down to find out what went wrong.
But, dysregulation has a nasty tendency to shove our minds into a state of needing productivity at all costs, so we must keep the situation moving: no time to stop and reassess.
And, like punching the throttle to full in a vehicle stuck in first gear, we do make movement. In fact, we can even move the needle further if we double or triple our efforts. I mean, it’s an absurd waste of resources and pushes hard against the constraints to the point of non-scalability, but who cares? We’re moving!
This is, by my definition of addiction, an addiction.
And, like all people who gain understanding, I’m an utter hypocrite, in particular about my writing.
- I was instilled with a unique blend of feeling worthless and that I had some sort of destiny to fulfill, so I had the ambition to build some form of writing that would radically transform society.
- My emergent method for grokking things is (mostly) exhaustive and time-intensive, so the effort should be directed to something legitimately meaningful.
- But, I had several distinct goals that can’t be harmonized:
- Understand things for myself generally enough that I can feel what it is
- Understand things for myself in all its specificities that I can work it as a viable career
- Understand things well enough that I can convey both of the above goals to other people
- Write things well enough that people would pay money to read the above goal
Naturally, this was a recipe for an obsessive disaster, and I’m grateful that this year-long season was enough trauma to bump me off the rails.
And, since I’m an obsessive overthinker, I’ll articulate what each of those things needs:
- The “gist” of just about anything has been made obsolete by search engines, and extremely obsolete from machine learning algorithms.
- As a pattern/language autistic, in-depth understanding is my specialty. But, it wouldn’t be reasonable for me to be a computer programmer, mechanic, registered nurse, aircraft operator, air traffic controller, and quality control inspector on top of my already vast career path. At some point, I need to stop that and specialize for people to pay me more money for things.
- Of course, teaching this stuff is also difficult to turn into anything meaningful. I might be a better summarizer than some yokel on WebMD or StackOverflow, but not enough that people would go out of their way to find me. There’s value in the low-effort solution, and my perfect-quality summary of just the facts doesn’t scratch the itch of 95% of the population because it doesn’t have wordy anecdotes and pictures.
- And, if I have to teach specialized information, there’s no reason for anyone to trust Some Random Guy Named Dave over “Doctor Hartman” or “Sue Yoo, Esq.” or “Mr. Johnson the mechanic”.
- And, naturally, monetizing this is the creme de la crème of bad ideas. I’d just be adding my limited stomach for marketing to an already niche market.
Until my soul was fractured recently, this was my ambition. And now it’s not.
I guess all I have left are my opinions. I’ve always tried to ground my opinion in fact, and now that opinion is probably my most important offering to the world, especially in the absence of any family to provide for. I find it ironic.
What I’m Doing
I am living out Lamentations 3:25-30:
- The LORD is good to those who wait for Him,
- to the soul who seeks Him.
- It is good to wait quietly
- for the salvation of the LORD.
- It is good for a man to bear the yoke
- while he is still young.
- Let him sit alone in silence,
- for God has disciplined him.
- Let him bury his face in the dust—
- perhaps there is still hope.
- Let him offer his cheek to the one who would strike him;
- let him be filled with reproach.
I still await Tori to reappear with Victor and Mia, but God may have more in store for her before we’re ready to meet again, or I may have to act soon.
This recent experience has broken me, but God has strategically used the situation to lop off some of my character defects magnified through autism.
In light of that, I’ve seen how mind-blind I’ve been to how others perceive information. To that end, I’m doing the following in no particular order:
- Migrating all my commonplacing to this repository.
- Dehoarding everything from this repository.
- Curating and clearing up the essays that matter.
As of today, I have 213 essays left to drop off my websites and 6,977 files to dehoard.