Thrown Away

I feel thrown away. Being forced, like and with my marriage, jammed, stomped into the trash. And I feel thrown away. Like garbage. Like an untidy side effect. An aborted attempt at something great.

Today is trash day. I put out the trash and the recycling on the sidewalk by this house, where all the walls are painted in colors she chose. And I fold laundry now, passing time. And I feel thrown away. I accept it, feel it, absorb it. I am trash now. Unwanted by-product. Something new may grow, someday. But today is trash day.

Self Hate

Talking to my soon-to-be ex-wife makes me hate myself, I just realized. I talked to her tonight.

I hate myself because I try to fit my idea of who and what I am into her idea of who and what I am and I fail miserably. I'm not that small. I'm not that incompetent and unaware. And I'm certainly not that cunning or conniving. But that's how she sees me: unaware, controlling, always playing an angle, never just loving or caring or honest, never simple and true, no, always something twisted and ugly and base. If only she understood that she can only project what she projects because that's how she knows herself. "Things are the way they are because I am the way I am." Horribly true words from Cheri Huber.

I feel if I could just make myself be the right way, she would want to be my wife again. She would treat me as an equal worthy of love, care, respect. Since I can't morph myself into someone else, something else that will meet her demands, I get massively disappointed in me. And the self-hate follows immediately. Deep self-hate. Deep hate because my marriage really mattered to me. My wife really mattered to me. The relationship with the woman who was my wife really mattered to me, more than anything. And look at me, I can't even change myself into what she wants and needs in life, so she left me and she's never coming back. Can you see why I might hate myself?

It doesn't make me feel good to talk to her. It feels like strife. It feels like someone not listening to me, not even trying to. It feels like trying to reach my father when I was a boy, who wouldn't listen to me, who always thought I was up to something even though I wasn't. I wanted to please him, I wanted him to love me. And I could never satisfy him. And that's how it's become with my wife. What do I do? Here I've been resisting the divorce the whole entire time, begging her, bargaining, pleading not to leave me, not to succumb to the weakness of ending a marriage because the relationship has some problems, pleading her to work it out, even forcing myself to accept her sleeping with another man and living with him. But as it turns out, maybe it is I who should have been seeking the divorce the whole time. I need to be with people who can encourage me, be kind to me, if possible. I should stay away from someone who only finds disappointment in me, who discourages me, who's displeased with me, who has nothing genuine, kind or compassionate to say to me.

Commitments

I am still married in law, but my marriage feels more and more like a dead husk ready to be sloughed off, cling to it as I might, still holding out hope that my wife, who is dead set on divorcing me, will somehow "see the light," have some revelation that marriage can transform total strangers into family. And family is important to me. Not to her, I guess.

Hope is an obstacle sometimes.

Marriage is about commitment. Not only marriage, but family too. And work, and whatever else you value in your life. You have to keep coming back to it. Keep committing to it. I've committed to the importance of my family again and again in my life, no matter how much I disagree with how any of them live or act: blood is thicker than water, at least it is for me. And work is also about commitment. As is a religion or program or spiritual path or what have you. And many other things, I'm sure, but work, family and some sort of discipline, practice or spiritual path in life are most important.

Terminally Ill

There is an awareness practice technique of considering life, all life, my life, as a terminal illness from which there is no escape, no avoiding death at the end. It is represented in the question from Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs: "Since death alone is certain, and the time of death unknown, what should I do?" And you see it used as a rhetorical measure to persuade one to thought and action in various Buddhist-influenced writings. There are three main responses to the question, which many of us find ourselves living even though we may never have heard the question stated explicitly. This is because this question captures the human dilemma of thought and action -- being an existence aware of its own death, full of desires, unsure which way to go.

1. Pull out all the stops, quit your job, move to another country, spend all your money, do everything you ever wanted to do, live life to the max and burn out like a flashing burst of plasma.

2. Slow down, appreciate your life and time, enjoy the simplest things, take pleasure in the treasures of peace, love, compassion and joy.

3. Hide, withdraw, resign yourself to death, the void, utter hopelessness and despair.

Divorce is wreaking havoc in my life. My partner couldn't take some powerful forces and negativity in her life, her past, herself (I think), and decided to blame me for everything and has sought solution to her problems by running away, starting a new relationship, living a fast, hectic, carefree life. Like a candle burning hot and fast. There she goes.

And here I am. I go back and forth. I don't want to, I can't just sit still and suffer without having compassion for myself. So I go to New York City and have fun seeing things I've never seen. I come to work and practice following through on commitments even though I really don't want to. I want to throw it all away. I want to disappear from the planet. I want it to be over. I cry.

So, this life, this terminal illness we all share, here it is. And how do we live it? How do we deal with it? I think the second way above is good to know about and to take refuge in when the first way proves not to last. The second way is stable, durable, always there to come back to. The first way is fun for short trips, but is also unstable, short-lived and, at its worst, reckless and harmful to self and others.

Buddhism is about the middle way. Always the middle way. The second way is the middle way. Sometimes we need to taste a little of the extremes in order to appreciate the middle. Here it is. Thank you.

Divorce

Divorce is painful. I am in the middle of one. It hurts, it makes you doubt and question everything you thought was worth something in life, such as love, fidelity, commitment, shared experiences. Divorce is a great way to flush your life down the shitter and see if it goes or if you survive and pull yourself free of the vortex sucking you into the sewer of broken marriages and broken vows.

My soon to be ex-wife tells me, which I find hilarious, that I'll be better off in the long run; she knows she's doing the right thing, choosing to be happy, la la la. Then she'll say "take care" when we get off the phone. It kills me -- "take care?" Does she care whether I take care or not? It's wonderfully blatant hypocrisy (wonderful because it's so unmistakable, so in your face, so, without a doubt, false sentiment).

I have trouble concentrating at work. I have trouble relating to people who have not been through divorce. I have trouble finding meaning in my life. I am trying, believe me. I read Viktor Frankel's Man's Search for Meaning soon after divorce began to take shape loom into view. I loved the book and felt I learned a lot. For one thing, no one's got more reason to have insight about suffering and how to end it than someone who's found well-being after surviving Nazi concentration camps or any kind of similarly horrid experience (unfortunately such experiences are all too common throughout history and even today, but we all like to think that Nazi Germany somehow realized and put an end to the deepest levels of depravity and suffering -- but I don't believe it -- I'd love to, but I don't see evidence for it). Another thing I read at the same time is Plato's Symposium, which is a Socratic dialogue on the definition of love. It was great and so true and even kind of Buddhist in its conclusion, but too much to go into here right now.

Pema Chodron, Tibetan Buddhist, talks about abandoning hope. She talks about how giving up hope completely is the best and, arguably, necessary beginning for a life of peace and compassion. Because there is nothing to lean on or hold onto in a non-theistic religion like Buddhism. Buddhism is realism. Hope is a grasping for something that isn't there and that we should learn we don't need. Why do we want what isn't there? Let it go. The real world that is here, right in front of us, is more than we could ever have hoped for. We just have to be willing to receive it by releasing our grip on empty hopes and fantasies and accepting what is as it is; things as they are. This message is not just Buddhist. We learn in the ancient Greek myth of Pandora that Hope is one of the evils of the world. When she opened the jar of evils and unleashed them on the world, Hope was the one thing that she managed to close the lid on.* Hello?! That means Hope was one of the evils! Anyone paying attention here in the West? The Greeks told us the same thing about the evil of hope over 2000 years ago. No westerner needs Buddhism, but a lot of us seem to only be able to understand our own culture and history by taking another look at it through a lens of something different such as Buddhism.

I thought of Dante's Inferno and the words over the gate of Hell: "Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here." Well, Dante wasn't Buddhist, but he might agree with Pema that since there is no hope in Hell, you really are better off abandoning hope if that's where you find yourself. That sign on the gate of Hell isn't just a threat or a command to be obeyed: it's a message of love and compassion; your suffering will only be greater if you hope that it will end. Because in Hell, that ain't happenin'. Might as well enjoy it if you can, because there's no escape. Ciao.

* An anonymous comment when this post was originally published stated that in the original story Hope was "the only benefit left for man." I went back and re-read the story in Hesiod and this was my response:

The jar is filled with evils. Why would Hope be in there? Zeus prevented Hope from escaping out of the jar. Is Hope an evil that would have harmed men like all the others? Or was Hope a good thing that mixed in with the evils -- yet did not escape from the jar? Hesiod does not say.

Hesiod may be saying that there is no Hope for mankind anyway since only if Hope had been released from the jar would it exist in our world (whether it is a good or an evil).

I think it's open to interpretation. I'd be interested to hear what in Hesiod's text supports the argument that Hope was a benefit left for man.