Giovanni & Boy - Part 1

       Abraham Lincoln said “A House divided against itself can not stand.” I offer that a person divided against him or her self has no better chance than a house.
        I was once a much more splintered personality. A man in conflict with himself. I had no idea what I wanted, because I was fighting with myself to find the answers. Today, I’m far from whole, but I’m getting there.
        Nowhere was I more emotionally conflicted than in my relationships with women. One side of me adored women without limit. The other side was in mortal fear of them.
        I was petrified because women could, and had, hurt me worse than I ever dreamed possible. And my macho bullshit ego believed that it was absolutely, completely, no-questions-asked-please-take-your-suitcase-and-get-the-hell-out-of-here-unacceptable to admit to yourself, or anybody else, that a man could be afraid of a woman. So I simply denied it.
        On the other hand, I was very in touch with the part of me who loved women. I’ll call this part “Giovanni”. I loved this guy. So did women. But I wasn’t crazy about the other dude. In fact, I hated him. I’ll call him “Boy”. He was fearful and anxious. So I hid him. From myself and from everybody else.
        But this Boy was still inside of me. And he still had a job to do: protect my heart. He got good at that. He could pull me away just a little, or completely shut me down, or employ many other methods. To keep me safe.
        Only when I accepted him, listened to him, embraced him, and had compassion for him, like a father does for his troubled son, did Boy stop trying to protect me. Only then did my relationship with this Boy, who was petrified of women, change.
        I did that this past summer when my heart got ripped out of me. I faced this frightened little Boy when his worst nightmare came true. He came running to me, devastated, alone, sobbing uncontrollably, screaming in pain. That’s when my own heart melted for myself.
I could not hide him any longer. I could not deny him or negate him one more moment. He was hurting worse than I had ever imagined. He had to be seen and heard. So I watched. And I listened. I spent lots of time with him and I got to know him. I got to love him. And so I got to love myself too. Funny how that works.
        Ever since I can remember, this Boy who feared women was in a No Holds Barred Steel Cage Texas Death Match with the other part of me who absolutely loved women. Within my own being, it was perpetual emotional mayhem. Giovanni and Boy were constantly duking it out.
        The dichotomy between the two of them was of Jekyll and Hyde proportions. While Boy is deathly afraid of women, Giovanni finds them the most compelling, beautiful, alluring, fascinating, magnificent creatures on the planet. He can barely contain his enthusiasm when he’s with them.
        For instance, I love placing my face firmly into the neck of a woman and inhaling. Lettering her sweet, unique scent fill my entire body, I experience a broad spectrum of sensations and emotions. Soothing contentment. Burning animal desire. Helpless rapture. Passion. Weakness. Love. And that’s just from smelling her neck.
        Reconciling this, and countless other intense female induced experiences, with the part of me that had to protect myself, took up considerable space inside me.
        There was, in reality, no reconciliation. There was forced tolerance. Like a couple who stays together not out of love but out of necessity. Giovanni and Boy coexisted because they had to. They didn’t like each other. Or understand each other. But they lived in the same house. Me. And that house was divided. And that house could not stand. Not any longer. So I crawled. On my knees. Into a new house that could.

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights, Wrongs, and Otherwise Omitted Deficiencies Reserved.

Full Tilt Halloween

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and Wrongs) Reserved.

Abandonment Part 3: Fire and Pain

       For years, my insides were like one big smoking heat sink, with small brush fires burning in selected locations and a few all out forest fires here and there. I would release the heat and the beauty of this fire through many forms of self expression. Music. Writing. Photography and film. And through simply being myself in the world.
        I did all of of this often enough, as friends of mine will attest. But I didn’t do it all of the time. And I wasn’t sharing my fire with the the whole world. And I wanted to. I wanted to be myself, all the way, all of the time. I wanted to release this beautiful burning light to the entire world. Not just to people and situations that felt safe.
        This went along with not showing all of myself in relationships. I never showed it all. I couldn’t be that vulnerable. I was too scared of getting hurt. What I did show was plenty, it seemed. I had many people in my life who knew me, and loved me, intimately and otherwise. And they always described me as unique. As out there. As deep. But I knew there was so much more inside of me that I wasn’t showing. There were depths to me that I dared not expose.
        All I needed to release this internal fire and turn it into a blaze that would ignite my life was a gallon of napalm. Enter my last girlfriend. Principessa. She stirred my insides up just by being herself, and neither of us realized it. She unknowingly stoked this massive, smoldering, barely contained cauldron within me. Then out of nowhere, she dumped me. It took a few weeks for that to hit. On the outside, everything was relatively unchanged. On the inside, it was chaos. The best kind of chaos. The kind that changes you.
        The pain of losing her triggered all of this other pain that I was storing inside of me. The pain, I’ve come to learn, was the napalm. The means for releasing all of myself had been within me the entire time. I just wasn’t able to access it. Her abandoning me put me in touch with that pain. All of it. KABOOM! My whole world was on fire. Burning with a reckless abandon the likes of which I could barely grasp.
        Going through the pain released my fire. All of my creativity and imagination and passion and desire and hope. It’s all burning brightly. All of the time. And I’m living it.
        That’s me now. My challenge is to let the fire burn with all of it’s brilliance and power and fury and passion and light, yet keep it harnessed for my highest purpose. Keeping it going is not an issue. There is more than enough fuel here to last my life time. And every moment that I live my life from my open heart, more fuel gets added. What to do with it all and how to do it is my challenge. And my life’s work.
        This website is just one piece of it. I’ve been exploding all over my life.
        And I will never again be so emotionally stingy. Whoever you are, if you want it, you are going to get all of me, all of the time, right from the get go. I’m not talking about inappropriately overwhelming anyone with how I feel or what I think. I’m talking about no longer hiding because I’m afraid of getting hurt. I’m talking about consciously aspiring at being 100% of myself 100% of the time. If you want to see me and hear me and know me and experience me and maybe even love me, I’m not going to shut you out. If you don’t want to know me, that’s fine. Don’t ask. But if you do, be careful for what you ask for. Because you are going to get it.

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and Wrongs) Reserved.

Abandonment Part 2: CARDIOPLASTICITY

       Neuroplasticity is a buzz word in the field of neurology. It states that the mind is perfectly capable of creating new neural pathways at any age. At any point in our lives, new experiences can create neural “re-wiring”. Therefore, we are not “hard wired” by adolescence, as previously believed. The mind, both consciously and non-consciously, can learn to think differently. In other words, we can literally change our minds.
        The same holds true for the heart. No matter how old we are, profound experiences can shift us emotionally and spiritually. If the heart was closed but is now open, we literally “feel different”. Our attitude shifts and our emotional experience of life expands. This literal change of heart impacts our lives in amazing ways. It happened to me. It can happen to anybody. So I’m coining a new phrase: Cardioplasticity.
        I used to equate love with pain. Whenever I started falling in love with a woman, the inner turmoil was unbearable. I experienced so much anxiety and fear of abandonment, that I eventually retreated to a place inside myself that was safer. I felt so absolutely out of control emotionally that I had to do something. Because if she knew how out of kilter I was, she wouldn’t like me anymore. I couldn’t let her know how nuts I felt inside. How scared I was. Because nuts and scared is ugly. So to share this with her would be the kiss of death.
        Because all of these fears came true with my first girlfriend. More than once. And that was all the proof I needed, thank you very much. But really, it goes back much further than that. It goes back to my original wound of abandonment. My experience from day one was that to love with all your heart, the only way a child knows how, was synonymous with abandonment. And to be left was to suffer unbearable pain. So don’t ever love with all your heart. It could kill you.
        When I was a kid, feeling and expressing love was a mostly unpleasant experience. I experienced a constant yearning that was met with only sporadic episodes of joy. Or even more rarely, bliss. And when that joy and bliss came, it was so unpredictable and short lived that I learned to expect it to end soon. And it did. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
        In adulthood, I learned how to get love without risking too much. I learned how to give love without leaving my flanks exposed. This wasn’t a conscious plan or a calculated scheme. This was autopilot emotional survival. Which isn’t to say that I’m not responsible for it.
        I honed an ability to pull away emotionally, just enough to stay safe, but not enough to lose her or drive her away. Because abandonment was still the overriding fear. I gave love, but I never gave it all. It was a psycho-emotional tight rope that I walked so that I could love, be loved, be safe, be in control, and not be abandoned. And like anything practiced, I got good at it.
        I never grasped the truism that love is something you get more of, the more you give away. The key was to give more. Not try to get more.
        That formula got lost on me. Because I was getting what I wanted: love, sex, and companionship, without giving away the store. And because I was coming from my head most of the time then. “Give to get” just didn’t make any sense from there.
        The only place that I gave everything I had was in the bedroom. That was the only place I felt safe. That was the only place I really knew who I was and what I was doing. Because my guard was down between the sheets, all of me came out there. All the love, all the passion, all the wonder, intensity, playfulness, and excitement. I just couldn’t carry that over into the rest of my relationship.
        Until we become conscious of what we’re doing, we keep repeating ourselves. We develop coping skills and strategies to minimize the fear and the pain. But we’re always missing something. We’re missing true intimacy. That was me.
        Operative word there is “was”. Thanks to cardioplasticity, I’m not there anymore. I still struggle with abandonment, but I’m aware of it now. More importantly, I know, not just intellectually but in my heart, that the way out of that abandonment pain is to go through it. Not around it. Or over it. Or past it. The way out is always through.

©2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a stupifying amount of Wrongs) Reserved.

My Sparkly Belt

       I’ve got this sparkly belt. The kind you get at those teeny-bopper earring and accessory shops at the mall. In fact, that’s where I bought mine. It’s leather, has a simple silver buckle, and it’s covered in those highly reflective, prismatic sparkles. It was cheap too. I think it cost me about fourteen bucks.
        When I first saw the belt, I didn’t think of it in terms of masculine or feminine. To me, it was just shiny and bright and sparkling and colorful. I’m drawn to such items, whether it be clothing or cars or music equipment or whatever else. Bright, shiny, colorful things always grab my attention. They excite me, stir something in me, give me joy. Just because they’re shiny and colorful and bright. Very much like a child who finds a shiny marble. It’s an automatic, pre-cognitive, visceral response. I can’t help it. Nor do I want to.
        In one of my first blogs, I talked about wearing clothing that reflects who you are on the inside. If you do this, then you look good in those clothes, regardless of what the clothes are. There is nothing in my wardrobe that better exemplifies this point than this cheap, sparkly belt that was designed to be worn by teenage girls.
        I can pull this belt off. Because I like it. Because I’m not self conscious about it. Because I connect to things that are sparkly and bright. So therefore this silly little belt reflects something that’s alive in me. If any of that wasn’t true, I’d look uncomfortable wearing that belt, and I wouldn’t be able to get away with it, so to speak. If you put me in a pair of khakis with a sweater, you would see a man at odds with himself. The way somebody else might be if they wore that belt.
        It’s got nothing to do with masculinity or femininity. Those are subjective labels that vary from person to person. I don’t find the belt feminine. I don’t look at it and go “That’s girly”. Somebody else might, and that’s fine. I look at the belt and go “That’s cool. I like that belt”. And that’s all I need to buy it. And to wear it.
        I haven’t worn this belt in over two years. I wasn’t even aware of that until this morning when I looked at it, grabbed it, and decided to wear it. The moment I threaded it through my jeans, an epiphany revealed itself to me. The last time I wore the belt was just before my dad died. Then I realized that when he passed away, something bright and shiny and colorful inside of me went away too. Just like he did.
        That something has been missing from my life since then. This past summer, when I experienced a great opening of my heart, that something started to make it’s way back to me. Through the last several months, that bright and shiny and sparkly and colorful something inside of me has been rediscovered. A major reason for that is because I’ve finally allowed myself to grieve the death of my dad, feel that pain, and thus invite this bright and sparkly something back. Pain was blocking this shiny something, and most of the other light in my life, from reaching me. Letting go of the darkness has opened me up to light again. I’m wearing the belt now because of what’s inside me again. Something bright and shiny and colorful.
        Who would have ever thought that a cheap sparkly belt made for teenage girls could teach a man so much?

© 2008 Clint Piatelli. All Rights (and a colorful amount of Wrongs) Reserved.