When is the right time to pull the rings and eject?
Is it when you’re over friendly territory?
Is it when you know your bird just won’t stay in the air any longer?
is it when you think you won’t cause any damage on the ground?
A million questions have to be going through the mind of a pilot when he or she ejects, maybe less if they’re engulfed in a fireball though.
I feel like that pilot, knowing that my bird is severely damaged, I want to keep in in the air for a little longer, get it back to the tarmac and save it; though I know that eventually, very soon in fact, something is going to break, and I will have no choice but to either to have a very eventful ride to the ground or I can punch out and land with some bruises, maybe a broken bone or two, but able to fly again soon enough.
My wife is cutting herself again. She did this about this time last year. Last year our relationship was starting out to get rough, I thought it was because of the holidays, so forth. I find out that she had fallen for another guy, and it was about that time she started cutting herself. Nobody really knows that, most people think that it was because of me not being home enough, which could be part of it, but after she is cutting herself again, I think this is the case again. She’s recently fallen in love with another guy again. A married 23 yr old kid. She’s going through a rough patch with him now. Who knows why, I ask her about it and she tells me that it’s not happening. However, when I take my feelings out of the mix and pay attention, everything is pretty apparent, pretty transparent.
Last year is repeating itself too. We’ve already spent over $100 on booze since the first, which I’m calling quits to. She’s cutting herself. She acts like a heartbroken 13 yr old kid who just got her heart broken. More or less, I’m tired of reliving shit, knowing that I can do everything that is possible, and nothing is going to work, because I’m not the key, my cock isn’t the key, my providing for the family isn’t the key. The key is someone else, always someone else.
It could also be, in part, that I do make her life miserable. I took her away from her son, her family, got a job in Kansas. I demand absolutely nothing from her, which I am guessing that is exactly the same as if I were demanding the impossible and everything from her. I don’t get it, and it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s there none the less.
I know that if this kid gets a job and leaves his wife, she won’t even bother to tell me that she’s leaving, she’ll be gone. I know that if/when those two conditions are met, I won’t get a thank you or a good bye, just a mailing address to have stuff shipped to.
Here’s the question. I know my bird is crippled. When is the right time to punch out. In the past 3 weeks of hindsight, I think I’ve been on the bird entirely too long as it is and need to just take my chances, that’s the gut speaking, the mind. My heart, well, that’s never been a consideration of any body’s, and me being the only one concerned makes me definitely in the minority, therefore it’s an insignificant event.
There’s my answer. Thank you crappy Dell keyboard for your insight.
A link between Bi-polar and empathy
This is complete conjecture on my part, and these are the random thoughts that go through my head at 4:30am when the alarm gets me up.
I have an outsiders perspective of being Bi-polar, my mother was that way, my ex wife, my wife, possibly a few others in between.
One thing that I’ve noticed is that someone that is Bi-polar seems to need to have more attention payed to them than someone that doesn’t have the condition. The amount of attention depends on the person, where sometimes it’s a little more than average, sometimes it’s requiring more attention that you can possibly give any single person to include yourself if you were in a sensory deprivation chamber.
There is a common link though; it’s the interpretation of how that person empathizes with the world around them. Maybe that’s the silver bullet so to speak. I sort of checked this with my ex-wife a couple of times, being overly and abnormally happy in the morning to see if it would change how the rest of the day played out. It typically went well, though it was exhausting for me to keep that up. She fed solely off of my emotional state to determine hers. My wife now does the same thing to a lesser state, though I notice it a lot more. She does feed off of her perception of me first thing in the morning, and even if I look grumpy or have stand-offish body language, and not say a word, she feeds off of that and she’s in an instant bad mood for a while. It doesn’t matter what kind of mood I’m really in, it only matters how she perceives my output.
Maybe those mirror neurons in the brain are over-active in a Bi-polar person. making them even more sensitive to the surrounding environment, and feeding their emotional state. It does make sense that my wife seems to have her moods more effected by the environment rather than a singular event, and the more chaotic the house is, the more her mood dives…my ex-wife, she would swing in greater magnitudes of order to any given situation, if something was done or said that could bring up or down a mood, her mood would seem to swing about 10-50 times faster and greater than it really seemed expected. My wife, I would say that she does operate with higher magnitudes of order but not nearly as severe.
More or less, I think there really may be a connection with the higher activity in the mirror-neurons, the monkey-see-monkey-do brain cells, that sends reactions to the rest of the brain for emotional or physical response in someone with Bi-polar disorder. I’m not trying to be critical here, but more think critically. If this is the case, then even though I’m not the one with the disorder, it may be me that really does feed the mood my wife has. It could be that I also have the same problem, just the complete opposite, where I feed less off of the emotional state of the environment, helping me gain my moniker of being the heartless bastard.
Only an MRI can tell…
Analogy of the day
Though I work within a very linear methodology, it seems that I’m able to explain a lot of what I do or think in abstract ideas that seem to be grasped more easily than me rambling on in boring acronyms and specifics.
This being one of them.
Maybe a relationship is like a floor. It gets used all the time, sometimes people don’t take off their shoes and track dirt onto it. We try to keep it looking nice, so we wax and buff it. Sometimes we get in a rush and don’t mop before we wax, only sweep the big stuff off of it first. Over time, that little bit of crud left over from not mopping gets caught up in the wax, and many layers of wax now have a little bit of dirt in them, making the shine look uneven, bumpy, and making the floor look older, more used, not kept up.
The only way to get the floor looking good is to strip it all the way down to the base floor, be it wood, tile, whatever. It takes a lot of solvents, a lot of elbow grease, and when you’re done the floor is very dull, doesn’t have color, looks even more used.
After this however, you mop it real good. You put on that first coat of wax, maybe hand buff it so there are no wrinkles, then buff it to a shine. The floor starts looking good again.
Maybe that’s what’s needed in relationships. Every so often, all the old wax and buildup from just hastily trying to make the floor look decent needs to be stripped to the core. It needs to be built back up, maybe next time with a bit more care taken than last time….doesn’t mean that it won’t need to be stripped again, it will, but at the end of it you’ll know that it’ll be a nice looking floor again after some hard work.
