FROM MINEFIELDS TO MOUNTAINTOPS by Neil O'Brien

Many years ago, shortly after entering the halls of Alcoholics Anonymous, I was asked to tell my story. In a fit of anxiety I exclaimed, “I have no story.” I haven’t attended AA in many years, much to the chagrin of my ex-AA friends. I guess AA is much like the mafia, once you join there is absolutely no possible way to depart, except in a box. But after twenty years I just felt like having a beer. One day I did just that. I have survived just as well with the beer as I did without. By that I mean I can wreck my life with or without the help of the evil alcoholic spirits. Given that fact I might just as well enjoy myself once in a while. For instance, financial ruin and two-and-a-half divorces all took place while I was free from the grip of “John Barleycorn.” I’m still using that brainwash lingo after all these years. I figured I just couldn’t do much worse from an occasional partaking of an alcoholic beverage. And that thought has held true.

There have been three or four lives that seem to me to be completely separate. In each one I’m a different person. Each life could be titled with a woman’s name. Like chapter one: The Susan Era. Sadly, the only thing that has remained constant is that every chapter has the same ending. I guess I’m still looking for the chapter that has no end. Right at the moment I feel about as far from that dream as one could possibly be.

I told a woman friend of mine who seems to be just waiting for me to make a move that I’m alone because I’m tired of feeling like I disappoint people. By that I meant wife-type people or relationship-type people. The thing is that I really like this woman. After I said that to her I thought, “Good work, Neil. There’s nothing a woman likes more than a great show of confidence.”

It’s time to start a new story. I’m not sure if the next chapter will be titled with a woman’s name. But I must admit to hoping it will be so. I guess a therapist would consider that to be a psychological defect, and tell me I must love myself first, along with the rest of the standard psychological mumbo-jumbo that I’ve heard way too many times. Screw Sigmund Freud anyway. Psychological defects aside, I’m still hoping to get it right.

Working in mental health, at this point, literally sucks the life out of me. Unfortunately being a starving artist doesn’t put food on the table and taking care of psychiatrically ill people does. It feels as if mental illness has been stalking me my entire life. It is time to say enough is enough. Mentally ill children, mentally ill wives, and my own depression that went unidentified for so long. Depression has often taken me down a dark lonely road with no off ramps and no u-turns signs posted all along the way. The thought that I am also dependent upon mental illness to live and eat is hard to bear. I think I have done my duty to the world of psychiatric disabilities.

Despite the earlier satire concerning Alcoholics Anonymous, I did learn some great things there. One that sticks in my mind is a little Charlie Chaplin-like, vagabond cartoon character. This happy little guy carried his past in a small bundle on the end of a stick, opening the bundle only occasionally to use one of life’s lessons in a positive manner. I’ve always liked that philosophy though I’ve never quite gotten the hang of it. My bag always seems to be filled with bricks. And they seem to be bricks with a reproductive system.

I had a dream some twenty years ago about an older man with long, gray hair who travelled the countryside writing. He was high in the Rockies, somewhere in Arizona or perhaps Colorado and there was a woman. She was not visible in the dream and she did not speak. The dream was about travelling, nature, and writing and a man who had learned to become one with the Universe. The woman’s presence, though the man did not see or hear her, was both strong and sweet, enhancing the experience, making an already incredible Universe even better. She was going his way and he was going hers.

After more therapy than anyone should ever be allowed, it is in the writing that I have figured it out. I keep writing about the endings. And it is for sure the endings that are preventing the beginning. The endings make the air thick with jagged knives that will cut deep in to my heart if I invade the space they inhabit and call their own. And landmines litter the earth, just waiting for me to dare tread in that hallowed territory called a new beginning. With that fear in mind I have lived all too long in the limbo-world. It’s time to move on, start the new story, and once again take that trek across the minefields of life. The possibility of being blown to smithereens is the price one pays to live. And even being blown up is more fun than being part of the living dead in the limbo world.