Ask anybody: I am a hot and cold person. When I am on, I am on—the world is my oyster. When I am cold, it’s Siberia. Never found the middle ground in this endeavor.
I drive my car like I live my life: super octane, red-line, and right until the empty light comes on, then I limp all the way to the gas station. I don’t know how to live any other way. I preach moderation but haven’t figured out how to practice it. I look at other people and am often envious of how they are able to meter their lives and create a median work/life balance.
This has been my greatest advantage and worst enemy throughout my life in all things. Those whom are family, or in a physical relationship with me, are subject to some pretty severe turbulence. A lot of efforts and energy are spent trying to get the things I NEED to get done so that I can spend the time doing things I WANT to get done. Rarely ever do I get to do the thing I want to do. The more it stacks up, the more needs eventually become wants, and then I am left limping along on empty, needing and wanting to do nothing at all.
I learned a long time ago that needs and wants are two very different things. Needs are must-haves: I need to have a job, I need to pay the rent, I need to feed myself. Wants are nice to have: I want to go on vacation, I want to go out on that “date night” tonight… but what I need is some sleep.
I’ve been cursed with marathon-levels of energy provided I don’t stop until I hit the wall. It makes getting close to me nearly impossible when I am on that track unless it is directly related to the task at hand. The second I stop, I crash. This curse is also a giant asset because as long as we can get the objectives-at-hand done before the crash, we can achieve great things in a very expedient manner. But as Newton’s third clearly states, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And it take a toll on you and your environment.
Some argue I am merely distracting myself from some of the things that are on my mind, and that might be part of it, but it’s not the whole equation. When I was a kid before David was born, I was the child of a single mom who had to figure out what to do with my days. Mom did what she NEEDED to do, even though all I wanted in the world was to hang with my mom (this is before you are embarrassed by your parents). I would sit in the basement of our house in Milford and create these massive complex cities using Legos and the Styrofoam packaging from the empty computer boxes my mom was selling when she was working at Digital Equipment Corporation. I spent a tremendous amount of time expressing myself through creativity. I learned how to operate very independently at a very early age, and what I quickly realized was that I could focus a tremendous amount of focus on a particular thing and hammer through it, but the second I allowed something/somebody else in, I would become frustrated at my inefficiency to get what I wanted to get done.
I became, and have become, despondent at times where I am trying to be present. The processor in my brain is only thinking about the “needs” list, and I am unable to really focus any energy on those that are around me.
When David was born, I was forced to make some room in my life. At first it was unbearable, accepting this new thing into your life, but slowly I came to learn that this human being was experiencing the same thing I was through a different lens, and you build a trust in that person because they could be counted on. They didn’t have a choice, given that we were minors, coexisting under the same roof, fighting for the same attention or for the same solitude, depending on the situation. He became the fire to my ice, and I his.
We learned to march to the beat of our own drum, and there was plenty of head-bumping along the way. When I lost him, I found myself grasping at air again where I no longer had a trusted sounding board. As with all people, when you start think about the oddities of your family life, a lot of “normal” things will appear absolutely absurd to outsiders looking in. We can only compare other people’s experiences to our own, and to say that David and I lived a very unconventional life would be an understatement. So, as I sit here typing now, I’ve lost my Ice or my Fire depending on the day or how you look at it, and I have a lot of great people trying to be more a part of it.
It requires a lot of trust and heck of a lot of time. It requires our putting our guard down and the others to allow their skin to be a little thicker and to relearn the lens through which we view things. It is always surprising to me to hear some of the feedback when I am approached on this topic on how other people view things, because when I think I understand why somebody is reacting the way they are, I notice subtle nuances that make it something else entirely.
Maybe someday it won’t be fire OR ice. Perhaps it could be fire on the ice creating a nice, fluid, comfy, tepid water I can dive headfirst into the deep end and swim as fast as I can, as far as I can, until I find that next shore and crawl onto the beach exhausted, letting the sun just warm me.
Alas, maybe some things will never change, but perhaps I can learn to enjoy the water a little bit before I hit that shore.
