My survival

For as long as I can remember I've been a minimalist at heart. As a child we didn't have much, but we had eachother. We were in it together and we made the most of it. Once that fell apart all I needed was freedom. I needed to feel like I took up space in this world, a space that was specially designed and created just for me. And being 16-years-old and on my own all I needed was enough to survive. Fiscally I've never known anything but minimalism. But the same can be said emotionally. I didn't come from a warm, encouraging or supportive environment. There was not the obligatory " I love you" or the perfunctory displays of affection or pride. I was conditioned to get satisfaction by being tolerated. All of the people in my life were disposable and no one lasted very long. There were no survivors. All were either destroyed beyond repair or escaped with their life and never looked back. I know how to survive, but I haven't the slightest idea of how to live.

The very nature of survival is self-serving, self- indulgent and selfish to it's very core. You take what you need without any regard to anyone else's needs. Compassion is a luxury you cannot afford. Compassion means the difference between your comfort and someone else's. Between your needs and someone else's. Your survival and someone else's. When you live on the bare minimum you hold onto everything you have for dear life. You barely have enough for yourself so the idea of giving away any portion of your meager rations goes against every fiber of your being, every instinct you have. And when your life is solely a battle to survive, not to thrive, not to aspire, but just to make it through another day, you only take people with you that serve a purpose. Someone you can gain something from, that has something that you don't. But because of your instincts of survival you only give back the bare minimum, hiding things from them, keeping things for yourself and only helping them so that they can serve you. Survivalists take hostages.

Emotionally, I have only ever survived, and just barely. I have taken anything I could get from anyone and when it came time to reciprocate there was a decision to be made. Wether I thought I needed more from you or not. Wether or not my emotional survival was contingent upon your contribution. Wether or not the emotional cost of you out weighed the emotional rewards. No one lasted long, and few survived. I would bankrupt any fool who would let me. There is only one hostage who has made it to the other side of this journey, only one I deemed valuable enough to keep, and only one who has survived; my wife.

My wife is a kind, gentle, caring, beautiful soul. A nurturing spirit, attracted to the sick and suffering. One who gets out of her own pain by immersing herself in the pain of others. Willing to invest her emotional savings into some poor wretched soul. Fortunately for me, that malnourished wretch was your's truly.

The gifts she gave me were so immense that for the first time in my life I was operating on a surplus. I had more than I had ever dreamed of. She's my best friend. And she had seen the mess behind the mask and didn't recoil in disgust or fear. Being the selfish survivalist that I was I didn't inquire about what she had to gain from this arrangement. I was occupied with my own acquisitions and I didn't want to disturb this delicate ecosystem with any kind of discovery. Don't rattle the hive. This surplus of love, without conditions, made it possible for me to give some of myself without the old fear of demise. And I did. This was the most valuable gift I had ever received and I would go to any length to make sure it didn't go away. I had my first taste of living without the constant thought of survival looming over my head. But life happens and these life events depleted my reserves. Death. Abandonment. Loneliness. And within a few years my savings dwindled to nothing. Then I discovered my new investment; alcohol.

Alcohol was the ideal survival tool for me. It required nothing of me and gave me everything. It made me feel like the person I had always wanted to be, made me feel the way I always wanted to feel. It was the cheapest hostage. Little did I know that I was, for the first time, the hostage. The only thing I had to give was everything I am. And in return alcohol removed my every desire and replaced it with a feeling of effortless complacency I had never felt. A sense of belonging. A feeling that I had a place in this world designed just for me. But being the hostage was taxing and you never know when it's going to stop working for you so I needed to keep my wife there to support me and my alcoholism. It didn't take long before I was giving everything to alcohol and taking everything I had to give from my wife, depleting her emotional currency, and giving her nothing in return. It took the loss of my freedom, my love, my life before I was released from alcohol, but not before I had set my life ablaze.