This Guy Doen't know himself and I do....

...and with those fateful words, George W Bush recognized that John Kerry was not authentic and therefore not as steadfast as he. John Kerry did not know himself. Bush knew who he was and knew he therefore had the upper hand. He also knew he could effectively change contexts and not follow the rules and Gore would be helpless and directionless.

As much as this blog has been the journal of my progress toward greater skills, income, and accomplishments, it's also been a struggle to be me inside my marriage.

Over the years since my adolescence I can see how I have relied on romantic relationships to fill a void of loneliness and emptiness. It was way worse in my youth and I would jump from one unsuccessful trist to another following a distinct pattern. First i would find someone who was needy or lonely, seduce her, fall into infatuation, then become annoyed or bored by the inevitable disconnects between us on deeper levels. Then, i'd break up with her and do it all over again.

To keep myself sane, I would ironically create an identity for myself. This identity was actually a broader story of fiction, placing me as the hero; the white knight. This went on with varying success until I ran head-long into my first wife, who was in as bad a mental health state as I. Within 20 months, I courted her, proposed, got engaged, married and divorced.

My divorce was a great reckoning of many delusional and selfish habits, but I did not continue that reckoning to the next step and truly understand myself the way I now need to. I did ask myself the questions and pursued the answers and pursued my current wife, too.

She's a lot of wonderful things, but compassionate and empathetic she's not. Over the past few days we've been hving candid conversations about what marriage is. Now, eight years of marriage later, I finally wake up to realize that. And, I find myself wondering a lot of things. Mostly, I wonder.. does she (did she ever?) respect me? Or, did she simply find someone to fill a lonely/emptiness gap of her own?

I realize that my life has been very inauthentic. Starting when I was a teen, I pushed to be funny and social and even popular. I invested in these "social skills" so much that during the time when I needed to really begin defining who I was, I was defining what character I should play in order to get friends, girlfriends, and jobs. To keep me fully isolated, I created a visceral fantasy life to fill in the gaps when I was alone. It wasnt until I faced real hardship in perpetuating that silly set of choices that I slowly began to wake up.

It was in that impared state of delusional perspective that I met and married my current wife years ago. I never could put a finger on why we werent connecting. I didnt have the perspective - from years of being apart from the real world, and my continued fantasizing and frustration prevented me from looking at our relationship and making some difficult observations.

I now need to know myself for real. That means going way beyond hoping to be saved by someone else. It means finally adopting a regular meditation practice. And, it also means facing the deep fear of realizing I am not me, somehow.

It feels now, like facing my mortality. It sure is the end - but of what?