Ruminations and Transitions

It's Just Another Cycle - Don't Panic

So…many of you know about the transition I’m currently in the middle of - a move 4 states away from my treasured furry friend Rosie. She was my constant confidante and my partner-in-crime. (The dastardly criminal offense of sneaking her extra treats when I thought nobody was looking!) When I first arrived in Florida Rosie would not let a male approach her for the most part or pet her. Gradually, over a period of time, she relented and we became best friends. I used to sit on my porch in the evenings and drink and talk to her - she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Dog, but I think we understood each other perfectly well.

It has been - to say the least - an unsettling and unnerving experience and has had the effect of sending me spiraling down into an episode of my long-running PTSD. I had held it at a managable distance for a good while.

Me and My Faithful Rosie - We Didn’t Speak Each Other’s Language - But We Understood Each Other

So, I was ruminating on it all last night, and came up with some pretty clear insights. But, first, let’s examine the word “ruminations.” [Dict.org]

Deep thought or consideration

• Rumination (psychology), contemplation or reflection, which may become persistent and recurrent worrying or brooding

It became pretty clear to me that I was in the process of “contemplation or reflection,” and that as it intensified into “persistent and recurrent worrying,” I needed to saddle up and get the hell out of that - as they used to say in prison, “with the quickness.” The alternative was landing in a morass of panic, hysteria and overwhelming depression…leading to an acting-out of epic proportion.

Now, the consequences of that acting-out would also be of epic proportion. Am I ready for those consequences? A resounding NO! was the deliberative result. I lived through an abusive childhood, almost a year in Viet Nam (I enlisted 4 days after my 18th birthday), drug addiction and finally, 47 years of Angola prison - one of the worst prisons in the country. It was once called “The Boodiest Prison In America,” and had no problem living up to its name and reputation.

I told you about my first day in Angola, and I told you about the first murder I witnessed there, and I told you about the experience of my sudden release in a different magazine, the Harvard Inquest. None of it has been easy. The days between have been long and torturous and have been something I can’t really talk about - I have to write about it. It’s strange how I can’t talk about something, but I can write about it.

Have you heard the expression, “The years flew by, but the days were so long,”?

I heard something like that the other day in some sad, bluesy song, and thought to myself how accurate it was. I’m about to turn 73 in 18 days, and while the years have flown past me, the days have been horrendously and agonizingly s-l-o-w. If only I could have seen this day 50 years ago, I daresay my life would have taken a different turn.

But, I didn’t foresee it and I took the turn I took. I might have taken it in a cocaine-and-heroin-induced fog, but took it nonetheless. And thus, the consequences of my actions dogged me, followed me, lived with me forever, and live with me today. Or rather, I live with them…

And maybe that is the real point of all this.

Maybe healing isn’t the absence of scars, or fear, or grief, or regret. Maybe healing is simply learning how to carry those things without letting them drive the truck straight off the cliff.

Because last night, sitting there in the middle of all this confusion and cardboard boxes and uncertainty, I realized something else.

PTSD lies. It whispers that every transition is catastrophe. Every goodbye is permanent destruction. Every unfamiliar room is danger. Every silence is abandonment.

And after enough years of trauma, your body starts believing it before your mind does.

Your pulse changes. Your breathing changes. Your thoughts start racing like prison horses breaking through a gate. You begin catastrophizing things that haven’t even happened yet. You start mourning outcomes that may never come to pass. The mind becomes a theater of worst-case scenarios playing on an endless loop.

And brother…that is an exhausting way to live.

But here’s the thing I also realized:

I have survived every single chapter that I once thought would kill me.

Every one of them.

I survived war. I survived violent men. I survived addiction. I survived burying friends. I survived decades of razor wire and steel bars and midnight counts and funerals in prison denim. I survived the loneliness of a prison cell and the even stranger loneliness of freedom afterward. I survived becoming an old man in a world I no longer recognized.

And somehow, despite all of it, here I still am.

Still writing.
Still hoping.
Still trying.
Still believing that people can change — including myself.

That doesn’t mean I’m unafraid.

I am afraid.

I am afraid of starting over again at nearly 73 years old. I am afraid of losing the few anchors that helped steady me. I am afraid of waking up in some unfamiliar apartment next week and feeling untethered from everything familiar and safe. I am afraid of the darkness that sometimes creeps in around the edges when exhaustion and memory join forces against me.

But fear and surrender are not the same thing.

I learned something in prison that took me decades to fully understand: courage is rarely loud. Most of the time, courage looks like getting up in the morning anyway. Making the phone call anyway. Packing the box anyway. Walking into the next chapter anyway.

Even when your hands shake while you’re doing it.

Especially then.

So this move - painful and emotional as it has been - is not just another relocation. It is another act of survival. Another refusal to give up. Another declaration that the worst things that ever happened to me do not get the final word.

Rosie taught me something about that too.

Trust sometimes returns slowly.

A little at a time.
One evening at a time.
One shared silence at a time.

And maybe that’s where I am now in life itself - learning to trust life again in small increments. Learning that not every ending is punishment. Learning that some transitions are not collapses at all, but crossings.

I don’t know exactly what waits for me on the other side of this move.

But for the first time in a while, I think I believe there is an “other side.”

And that, all by itself, feels like hope.

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Sorry for the long monologue, but - maybe my ruminations will help someone else, help them to not give up…help to heal. Until I post again, peace…

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