Lifetime Forecast: Mostly Cloudy With A Chance Of Pain

I started a pot of coffee at three minutes after eleven on a Sunday night and as soon as I hit the start button my eyes were drawn to coffee grounds and sugar that had been spilled on the counter earlier in the day and I found myself stuck. I could only stand there and look. I knew I needed to clean that up. I wanted to clean it up. I just couldn’t make myself do it. Instead I felt a sense of vertigo like I was trapped in that moment, present and distant all at once. I had to fight back the urge to scream, or to cry, or to just walk out of my house and leave.

Don’t misunderstand me here. It’s not that I’m not a clean freak. I’m a single parent with three kids, two of whom are eight and ten, and still live at home. The ‘my house will be neat and clean’ ship has sailed long ago. But, that being said, I do like to make sure my kids live in a mostly clean house that is nearly clutter free. I spend many hours dedicated to that goal, in fact. And then other times… I’m under the clouds.

You see, my life is spent in and out of the dark, figuratively. It’s like I’m always walking down this long road, and there are all these dark clouds in the sky. Sometimes there will be good patches, breaks in the clouds that let the sun shine in, as I continue to walk. Occasionally these patches will last for weeks and on the truly rare instance for months. They always end, though. The Sun will fall behind the clouds and everything will be dark again.

That’s the way my life works, the way my mind works. Depression is by far my longest running relationship, and she’s loyal. She stays with me no matter how good things get. She sits patiently in the shadows in some corner of my mind. Waiting. Then something will happen, a trigger, coffee grounds and sugar on the counter, and there she is. She wraps me up in the dark and holds me tight. Assuring me that everything I do is wrong, and that I am most assuredly a failure – at being an adult, at keeping up with my house, at being a parent, at any and everything in my life.

I can go for months on end trapped in the same cloudy day. I can put on a smile like I put on a hat. I can make jokes and lighthearted conversation as easily as I can write any piece of fiction. I can even lie to myself convincingly for very short bursts. The clouds, though, they stay.

More often than not it’s just an overall feeling of failure. It’s a sensation that I’m out of place everywhere. I don’t belong. Nothing will work out for me. No one really likes me, they just put on a nice face, because they are nice people, and they pretend. Anything good that I have is undeserved. All pretty much standard fare. Other times, however… other times it gets bad. It gets painful. Down deep painful. It gets bad enough that I start to scrape against the bottom of myself and want things to end.

I can tell myself rationally that I don’t really want that. I know I don’t. But the argument in my mind is no less real, no less loud, no less exhausting. I can tell myself that I have people that would listen to me, let me vent, be there for me. As luck would have it, though, once I’m at that point my mind has already convinced me that they don’t really like me anyway and they would only be listening or pretending to care out of some sense of kindness or pity, and that it would only serve to make them not want to be any part of my life afterward. Besides, I tell myself, your problems are petty and small, not worth the time it would take to talk about… you need to just get over it… or just be done with it all.

I have a decent life. It’s been better than it is today. It’s been worse. I eat. I have a place to sleep. I have toys and clean clothes for my kids. When I focus on it I can actually feel happy for a while. I can concentrate on the good things, and I can feel good. I can walk in the sunshine and I can smile real smiles. But even when I do that I know that it’s just a break in the clouds, and my lifetime forecast, every day, is: mostly cloudy with a chance of pain.

Who can love the unlovable?

Who can love the unlovable?


My dad left when I was five 
I didn’t understand it. 
What five-year-old does, right
I remember the fights
My mother and father screaming
As often as not it was about me 
Or something I had done 
I remember the ‘licks’ 
That’s what they were called in my home growing up
I would earn them for every misstep
Every mistake
Every misbehavior
All day long
They added up 
And then they were applied
En masse
At night before I could go to bed
Every night
My first memories were of going to bed
In pain and crying
That’s how it was
Just a fact of existence

When my dad was gone 
Discipline fell to my mom
To say that she was ill prepared 
Would be a gross understatement
Her father had beaten her as a child
She didn’t know any way to react
To a child that felt he was to blame
For a litany of instability in his home
Except to emotionally
Verbally
And very physically
Erupt
To lash out
Striking anything and everything close to her
Pushing an angry child
To hate
Life and himself
Even more than before

School was bullies and good grades
That weren’t ever quite good enough
Social awkwardness and anxiety
Were at a premium
Then came the relocations
Moving was just something that was done
Every year or so
New schools
New teachers
New bullies
New fights
Repeating pains
Growing disappointments
Same depressions and anxiety
Same withdrawal and building rage 

Accepting assault became the standard
Verbal
Emotional
Physical
When it was sexual
That just piled on
I deserved it
I was awkward
I was different
If my family didn’t even like me
Why should anyone else
Why should I
I hated the world
I hated me more

Breakups
Divorces
My own relocations
I was running
From anything that was difficult
From people who didn’t like me
From myself
And guess what
Big shock
It didn’t work
I tried new places with new people
I tried new clothes and new music
I tried reinventing the me everyone saw
The me inside was still damaged
Still broken
Still raging
Still in pain

Learning to love me
Loving the unlovable 
The worthless
The loser
Was hard
But it had to happen
A friend found me
The barrel of a gun in my mouth
So drunk I couldn’t stand
Blubbering and crying
That five year old acting his age
I showed who I was
Quite by accident
To someone outside myself
And they didn’t run
If she could see me
Address me
Then maybe
Just maybe, mind you
I could

It was a ten year journey 
From there to point
Where I could say I accepted me
And a few more years before
I could say like
Or love
But it happened
It’s real
I’m there
I still struggle
I have bad days
We all do
But if the unlovable
The disappointment
The throwaway
The worthless
Me
If I can do it
If I can make it
If I can accept me
And care about me
Then nothing is hopeless
No one is hopeless

I told a part of my story
Recently 
Publicly
I cannot express
There aren’t words
That can be put together
In any combination
That can explain
How humbled and blown away I was
By the response I got
The words
That other people
Mostly strangers
Had thought out
To send to me
In reply to what I had shared
They were  kind
They were supportive
They were loving
Loving words
From a normally cold world
Loving words
To an downtrodden child
Loving words
To the unlovable
To me

I’m learning
And in some ways I’m slow at that
To accept
The kindness of others
Without second-guessing
Without suspicion of motive
It’s not easy
Overcoming my depression
My self-loathing
My anxiety
My social awkwardness
None are easy
They are a struggle
But if I can accept me
And be accepted
You can be accepted
Fact
No argument
If I can love me
And be loved
You can be loved
Fact
End of discussion
Who can love the unlovable
Everyone
You


-Dennis Sharpe

I'll Never Tell...

*Trigger Warning* this post contains mature situations that may trigger some people/survivors of assault or abuse.

I don’t make a regular habit of addressing issues, but lately the news and social media keep hammering me with things that hit me hard emotionally, and I really have something to say. I’ve never written about these things, so this is all a bit raw.

When I was a kid, set your way back machine for 1989, I was a little bit more than a handful. My Dad left my life when I was five, and my mom worked full time and went to school, and me? Well, I went a little wild – left to my own devices. I was an avid maker of mix-tapes and reader of comic books. I was a 7^th grader with a bus pass, and we lived in Tucson at the time, and the city was my playground. It was an over-all miserable time in my life, but I can look back on the bright spots of it fondly. Candy and Baseball cards from the Circle-K and used comics from Bookman’s – where I spent way too many afternoons reading books and magazines that I’d never pay for – it was before the days of the internet, and I read whatever I could, wherever I could.

The meat of this little tale though, has to do with my education. I lived in a low rent apartment complex and attended a school that both served to teach me more than the lessons that generally come wrapped in school books. I had lived in Southern Illinois, and Western Kentucky, before moving to Arizona, and I had dealt with a different sort of public school education before relocating to the South West. I was thoroughly unprepared, sheltered a bit maybe, for the Spanish language barrier. I was also completely unprepared for being hated for the color of my skin.

I was chased from the bus stop at my school, and in my neighborhood, more than a few times by angry children my age or older in groups, sometimes being pelted with rocks, other times being hit with worse things.

White was not a thing to be. Evidently neither was Asian-American or African-American. I had some Latino friends, but by and large, I found that most of the native Spanish speaking children had their own groups, cliques, and clubs, and the other races – the minorities – were seen as un-people.

I had never had a very racially diverse group of friends before in my life and suddenly my social circle was a melting pot. From African-America and Asian-American to Indian and Native American, we all shared a similar disdain from a majority populace that spoke a language we didn’t and that a majority of wanted to marginalize us at best or, in the worst cases, wanted to harm us for who we were.

I was hated in those situations, for nothing more than being present and being white.

That didn’t last, for me. It was an isolated incident in my life. It was a time and place that is filed away in my mind, that I can look back on and remember, but it isn’t my day to day experience anymore. Why? Because I learned different behaviors, to avoid those situations? Yes. Because I eventually moved away from there? Yes. Because kids grow up? Yes, that too.

But, I feel that living it was a positive experience for me. I had a time in my life when being white wasn’t a positive thing. Other people with other skin colors don’t get to have a limited exposure to this kind of treatment, and then get to “get away from it”. It’s their lives. It’s real. It’s every day. And it’s total bullsh*t.

I’ve seen far too many people talking about “white privilege” as a creation of minority groups. They talk about it like it’s some kind of fiction that people of other skin colors made up to somehow victimize white people. Guess what? That’s bullsh*t, too.

Fast forward a year, and there was another lesson for me. Something I never wanted to learn, but something life was going to teach me. I was a more rebellious and more difficult to deal with child. I was depressed in school, acting out at home, loud and obnoxious to those who cared about me, and lost in a world of books to hide from all others my age that I was too afraid to talk to. I was coming apart at the seams.

My mother, God love her, headed the advice of a pastor and had me sent to a Baptist boarding school. All of the students were going home for Christmas break. The only two left in the dorms were 8^th grade me, and a popular, awesome, senior football player who told me of the wonders of the video game system in his room. He told me I should join him and play some games. We were going to be friends. My social stock was going to be on the rise, after break, and I got to play video games, too. Life was really looking up.

Once in his room he suggested, as I was playing, that we sit, and then lay on his bed. Then he said I should take off my shirt and he’d give me a back rub. I thought that was odd, but he was a big popular athlete guy, and I was a pudgy little 8^th grader who was always alone with my books. Who was I to argue? Right?

Some crying and screaming and attempts to kick him off later, all the while with him telling me “Just let it happen. You’ll enjoy it.” He finally got sick of my fighting and just punched me again and again until I was spent and simply laid still and took what he wanted to do to me. I was numb. It hurt, and I was crying, but my mind just turned off. I stared at the word Nintendo until that was all I knew in the world – all I could wrap my mind around.

I was black and blue and bloody when it was over and he shoved me out of the room, telling me I needed to get a shower, and that if I told anyone my “ass was grass”. He had nothing to worry about. I wasn’t going to tell anyone. I was too embarrassed, and hated myself too much for letting that happen – for not being strong enough or smart enough to stop it or prevent it. I wasn’t telling anyone. What he gave me in that room that day was a lifetime of anger, and self—loathing, and misery. I did eventually ‘let it happen’. I didn’t ever ‘enjoy it’.  

(I’ve never written about this before and it never even occurred to me, until writing this down, that after this I completely stopped playing video games, and to this day still don’t have an interest in playing them.)

Where I live now, where I’m at in my life, as a thirty—something adult and father of three, is a completely different reality. I’m not afraid. I’m not a victim. I don’t have to deal with suspicion of my actions, or my motives, or my very presence, based solely on the fact that my skin in pale. I am a man, so I don’t have deal with the fear that women have to deal with every day, of becoming a victim of male-on-female violence simply for being born a gender that society has allowed (for far too long) to be mistreated. I am heterosexual, so I don’t have to worry about being the victim of a hate crime simply for expressing myself or my love for another person. These are privileges I enjoy, even if I didn’t ask for them, simply by being a straight white man. The thing is, these aren’t privileges. They are basic human rights – to live, and to love, and to exist without fear. That’s common sense, or at least I believe it should be. The hour has grown far too late, for us not to understand this, and not to eradicate the prejudices that promote racism, sexism, homophobia, and a scads of social injustices that people try to shelter, hide, obscure, and yet still promote through their daily life.

I’m not a fan of labels, personally. I never have been. I don’t see any other way to deal with this kind of bigotry though, other than to call it what it is, and by not being afraid to call it out when we see it – to not accept it. Call it what you will – racism, rape culture, gender inequality, homophobia, hate, lack of human compassion. It has to be called out, it has to shamed, and it has to be clearly and plainly shown that it is not acceptable. Not here. Not now. Not ever.

-Dennis Sharpe