David Ronnie

As I was slowly starting to come to grips with these demons that I had buried deep inside of me, I was getting ready for a summer of weddings, an epic concert, and a slew of road trips across BC and Alberta. I hadn’t really come to terms with my demons or completely confronted them, per se, but I definitely had a much bigger grasp on what it was that I was facing and was starting to generate a plan of attack to confront them.

Over the course of July and August 2008 I ended up logging over 70hrs worth of solo-driving going between Edmonton, Calgary, Pemberton, and Vancouver. This, ultimately, was exactly what I needed. Nothing but the open road, some junk food, and a lot of time to myself to think. The roads trips gave me a ton of time to really consider everything that had been exposed to me in the previous month or so and I ended up coming to a lot of really deep and profound conclusions.

I drove up to Edmonton on June 30th to surprise my mom for her birthday and spend a couple days with her before I headed down to Calgary to hang out with my cousin/best friend and enjoy a couple weeks of Stampede before I was to be a groomsman in a wedding for mid-July.

While I was in Calgary, I discovered a book called Adult Children of Alcoholics by Janet Woititz through a serendipitous adventure to Chapters and managed to consume the entire thing over just a few days. It helped me to understand not only the symptoms and causes of alcoholism, but it helped me to identify a lot of the issues and impacts my father’s alcoholism had upon my entire life as a whole. ACOA help me identify with remarkable clarity the issues I had in personal relationships (intimate/friendship/business/other) as well as a number of issues I had to do with my own sense of personal self worth. It was through this book that I really opened up to all the various facets of my life where my father’s alcoholism had truly impacted me.

The anxiety in social situations, my fear of success, my inability to truly connect on an intimate level with lovers, my desire to keep people just close enough that they felt we were friends without letting them see the real me, my money issues, my seclusionary habits, my inability to stand up for myself with certain key figures in my life… and that’s just the beginning. It was like everything I had ever struggled with in life all of a sudden came into blinding focus with this book. All of the little points in time started lining-up and connecting themselves to one another.

It did, however, take a long time for much of this stuff to really sink in and I spent most of the summer and the road trips still really trying to comprehend everything and, in particular, struggling to release as much of it as I could. It was really hard because I had all these perceptions and ideas about myself from nearly 25 years of life on this planet, and all of a sudden, none of those ideas and paradigms matched up anymore. It was, really, the start of the death of whom I was, or at least whom I thought I was.

Of course, nothing put that into perspective faster than spending all that time going to three different weddings in Alberta. There’s no way faster to catch up on your past than going to a wedding of people you’ve known for a decade or more (of which I had three). Now, I want to make sure that any of my friends from Alberta reading this understands that this is by no means meant as an insult. It just really helped me put into perspective how significantly I had changed as a person from my time in Vancouver, even before the start of this meltdown. My interests, my thoughts, my activities… everything was different from what my life had entailed when I was back in Alberta.

By the time this path had run its course through July and most of August, I was fully ready to acknowledge the death of the old me and engage fully with the new Vancouver-based me. However, I still had one major lesson to learn before that was to happen.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 at 5:55 pm and is filed under The Journey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.