Pride

I watched the last strands of sobriety drowning in my beer. Shifting on my barstool I offered up a prayer or made a wish, whatever would work, to please just make it stop hurting. Even copious amounts of alcohol weren’t making me numb.

It wasn’t even the brutal way she dumped me. Even before I’d met her in person, I knew she was trouble. Something in the way she cocked her head in her online photo, something in the way her emails read … I knew. I knew it was over before it began. Yet I couldn’t help myself.

I ran headlong towards all sorts of things that were bad for me then. I was smoking too much, drinking too much and loving someone completely incapable of loving me back. Somewhere, Logic was shouting very loudly at me that I was a complete idiot who needed to pull herself together. But Ego had turned Logic’s volume down.

Ego is a bitch.

I thought about pouring my heart out to the attractive bartender, but Ego had turned my volume down too.

Fortunately, Ego was taking a nap when I was talking to my therapist a few days later. I guess I’m a backstabber because I was running Ego down pretty good while she wasn’t around to defend herself.

Ego let me think I could make someone love me. Ego let me think I could keep being gay quiet from those who didn’t want to know. Ego let me think I could handle the eventual collapse of that house of cards. Logic knew better, but Ego wouldn’t listen.

“You’re awfully hard on yourself,” my therapist said.

Logic shrugged my shoulders and said, “I walked into this with open eyes. I knew I’d get hammered. I’ve no right to be surprised.”

“I’ll grant you that,” she said, “but you don’t think you deserve it do you?”

It was, of course, at that moment our time was up. I wandered out into the bright sunshine and behind the wheel of the car. As I drove, Emotion welled up and started clamoring for a vacation from all this.

Emotion, bless her heart, was battling my broken heart as well as Ego’s detachment from reality after I’d lost my job. Emotion had been working really hard to assuage grief and shore up Ego, but she was fighting a losing battle.

“Hiatus,” she whispered in my ear. “We need a break from all this.”

For a long time, I’d been thinking of just what I wanted to say to the one who broke my heart. Something more coherent and less full of vitriol than our last exchange. Logic and Emotion were both in agreement it would have no impact. It was, sadly, at that point Ego woke up.

I braced myself for the loud argument I was sure would ensue. But somehow, Logic and Emotion got it together and gave Ego an out. Put simply, it was time to say goodbye.

Time to say goodbye to unhealthy habits, unhealthy situations and unhealthy people. It was time to embrace the people, places and practices that were positive and supportive. It was also time grow up and stop expecting good things to just appear and work on making them happen.

The bad job was easy, it was gone and I was looking at a much greener pasture. I crumpled up my last package of smokes and shoved it in the trashcan. I sold some of that writing I’d been hiding on my hard drive. I made time for some of the people I’d been neglecting.

Logic and Emotion also came together to pen a letter to my heartbreaker. It wasn’t angry but not overly contrite either. Its most salient point was goodbye. I actually smiled when I hit send.

Ego had gone on permanent hiatus and Pride had taken her place. With the shadows of those dark days receding, I decided I was only going to try to focus on the things that filled me with hope and promise. I was only going to surround myself with the people who made me smile. I was only going to do the things that filled me with a sense of Pride.