View from inside the cave June 7, 1985

  

Dear Rita:

The worst is over.

That is, things have settled down enough for me to take a breather. The court was kind, taking only a percentage of my income.

May has always been a tough time for me to get through.

Freud’s reckoning doesn’t please me. Sometimes it’s easier to believe that God or fate rather than we bringing disasters down upon ourselves.

Freud and his followers claim we merely shift blame from ourselves onto God or fate or something else, rather than accept the fact we – ourselves – are to blame.

His theories operate in a social vacuum and assume that the individual mind is the only thing in play when it comes to such things, ignoring the countless interactions we have with society and other people.

Still, I am one of Plato’s people living in a cave, mistaking shadows on the walls for reality. I’ve always felt safe in the dark, mistakenly assuming nobody can see me.

The women in my life are those who have reached into this cave of mine rather than me having to reach out.

Maybe it’s lack of courage that has kept me from touching those people I care most about.

I tell myself I’m not good enough or use some other excuse to remain private and isolated.

Lately I’ve gained weight again, becoming another barrier.

Yet for some reason, the women who have chosen me shrug off all my excuses, and somehow manage to push past my defenses and reach the most vulnerable part of me. And for some reason, I manage to sabotage these relationships.

Some believe it takes a life time to overcome these basic problems. Dr. Thomas, a Freudian professor at the college, doesn’t believe they can ever be settled, merely a constant struggle to modify the ill effects.

I tend to repeat the same mistakes I’ve made in the past.

I don’t believe in the universal unconscious or in synchronicity. Yet clearly, I’ve been impacted by being abandoned by my father when I was an infant and being raised by a mentally ill mother, who spent most of my early life trying to get away from something neither of us could see, and eventually saw her locked up in a mental institution.

Deep down, I have to ask the fundamental question: Am I a terrible person that some many of those close to me need to abandon me?

Maybe that’s why things have been so rough lately, watching other people I love fleeing – Fran, my ex-wife, Mary Ann (my longest friend), and Pauly (my best friend.)

I hate to think Dr. Thomas is right, that there is no cure.

Or perhaps, the cure of all of this is in my writing, the struggle to reshape reality into what I wish it would be rather than what it is, a struggle to recreate the world (God-like), although at the same time riding an emotional rollercoaster as I relive traumatic moments in such recreations.

I need sleep so I’ll sign off.

I just wanted to let you know that I’m really all right, even if it doesn’t sound that way from this letter. I’ve survived to move on, to fight another day, hopefully in-between these battles, I can find some peace.

 

Your strange friend,

Al Sullivan

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