theruyak

[theruyak]

To Survive

I’ve stopped and started this thing probably a dozen times at this point.  For someone like me, notoriously opinionated and always spewing words this way and that, you can imagine how troubling that is.  Words, for me, have always come easily…and when they don’t it feels like I've lost y grip and been carried out to sea.  For this, at least, I guess I will just let myself get carried away.

When I was a kid I was molested by a priest.  I couldn’t have known at that time how much my life would change, the nuanced ways in which my identity would be, to some extent, shaped around such a dark time in my life.  Now, I’m 31 years old and I've been grappling with this for over half of my existence.  To be a survivor of a sex crime…you have no idea until it happens to you what that even means.

I’m not writing about this out of the blue.  Last week, a guy that I knew in one of my college support groups for abused people, committed suicide.  He is the 6th person in our group of 11, tipping the scale to a place where the majority of people in my original cadre of misfit toys have taken their own lives.  Sadly, this is a known reality for those who are survivors.  I remember in college one of my psychology professors so cavalierly pointing out “molested kids tend to take their own lives” - as though it was just another statistic and as if no one in the room would one day fall into that collection of data.

I’ve been pretty quiet about all of this for a myriad of reason.  Shame is the most obvious, although as I will describe in the following collection of words I am relatively inoculated from that experience these days.  Concern that sharing this story would reopen the old wounds of people who suffered greatly during my tenure as the most reviled person in my little high school community - teachers, students, innocent families, even the people who made my life a living nightmare.  You learn pretty quickly that the collateral damage when you come forward about sexual abuse tends to be quite extensive - and that is before you even start to look at the remnants of your tattered old life.  Mostly…I have built a life that is devoid of the effects of the affirmation or condemnation of others - and when you share hard things like this people always have an opinion that they feel the need to share with you, and I am not here for that.  I am not here to be called a hero, or a villain, for sympathy or for rage.  Therefore, sharing this stuff always just seemed needlessly exhausting.

So…while there is a lot that I am going to be unpacking here, I do have several intentions around why I a writing this.

1) If my words, and the way in which I have been able to save myself from falling to suicide, can help just one person, I believe it is obligatory for me to share it.  I have tried to distance myself from the experience of suicide and from the suffering of my fellow survivors but things have changed for me recently - we do not know if we are here for another century or just another day, and I do think some of these “truths” need to be shared.

2)  To give people who haven’t had this experience a comprehensive understanding of MY journey through this nightmare in the hopes that it will inspire empathy when considering the survivors or sex crimes.  The reality is, until it happens to you there is no way for you to understand the many tortures of a life being a formerly abused human being in our society.  To be stripped of dignity, made a monster simply because of something that happened TO you…it is a special kind of hell.  And the stain.  You are forever stained.  You cannot pretend these things didn’t happen to you, our world won’t allow it.  Forever we walk through life seen as broken or defective at best, complicit or degenerate at worst.

3) To honor those who are struggling with this.  Abuse is something where even when you meet other people with similar experiences, we don’t talk about it.  It reminds me of women who suffer miscarriages.  I hope that by sharing a few painful details of my life, I can bring a sense of relief and solidarity to you if you have been bearing this burden alone.

Ok…well let’s dive in.

—

When I was in high school at Georgetown Preparatory School, I was sexually abused by a Jesuit priest.  He ran the theatre program at Prep, was as close to a mentor as I had had at that time, and was deeply loved by the community.

Leading up to this moment, I do not recall being happier.  I was a precocious, affectionate, loving kid who had found his niche in the theatre.  I had more friends in that program than I had ever had in my life, and for the first time was coming to understand what it meant to really love other people.  I think I loved them, my friends from that time…I don’t really remember anymore.  I had been cast as the lead in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which I was tremendously excited about…and then everything changed during a one on one rehearsal with (then Father) Gary Orr.

I didn’t tell my family right away.  I didn’t tell anyone, actually.  I was confused, enraged, and terrified of losing all of my friends and of losing this community — a community which revolved around a man who had sexually assaulted me.  It seems silly now when I look back…thinking that I had a choice as to whether or not I would lose all of that.  I lost them all the second I walked into that rehearsal.  Our society spends so much time treating sexual predators like animals, when they are actually people.  Sometimes intelligent, almost always wholly self-absorbed.  However, the rabbit hole of “what makes a monster” if a whole other 50 page journal entry that I don’t think I have the strength to dive into today…the only relevant point is that events had been put into motion over which I had no control, and they were beautifully orchestrated by this priest.

I did come forward about the abuse eventually.  I went to a young priest who was a close friend of my family…and also a close friend of the priest who had attacked me.  He told me he would go to the administration and would go to the provincial, who is the head of the jesuits in that particular “province”.  He said the police had to be notified, and that he was on my side.  I was called in by the interim headmaster the next day and questioned for about 5 minutes.  He told me the school would be contacting the police (which at the time was compulsory by law within 24 hours of any child making an accusation of abuse.)

Learning number 1 - never trust the institution responsible for the offending party.  I loved Prep, but they time and time again committed illegal actions in an attempt to discredit the accuser and protect this priest, who a decade later we would find molested over a dozen kids over his time at this high school.  They NEVER went to the police, and I later discovered had multiple conversations, over the phone as well as through email, where they expressed that they knew full well their obligation to go to the police and actively chose not to.  Prep as an institution is wonderful…but every institution is only as “good” as the people running it, and my high school decided to do everything they could to protect this priest, regardless of the accusation or the veracity of it.  As a matter of fact, I later was told by a Jesuit priest who had been tasked with investigating Gary Orr that the provincial often floated the question 
“how do we get the troublesome faggot expelled?” - If you decide to come forward, which is your decisions alone, you must always go first to the police.  Orr finally was brought to justice because a man who he had raped weekly for months while he was a 14 year old freshman boarder at Prep in the early 90s came to the Montgomery County police at the age of 36, and my complaint and accusation were on the books.  Only then did the avalanche of accusations that would crush the molester came rushing in.

After I came forward, I thought naively that things would get better.  I thought the school that I loved would protect me, my friends in Theatre would believe me, and that the world would come together to vanquish this great evil in our midst.  After all, why would Eric Ruyak…top of his class, well adjusted, well-liked, never in trouble Eric Ruyak…why would he make something like this up?

I didn’t understand people then as I do now.  “The truth” and “my truth” are two very, very different things.  It wasn’t long before Orr unleashed his trap, accusing me of being mentally disturbed, claiming that I had told him I had some sort of psychological problems.  He claimed I had come to him and confessed not just to being gay but that I was sleeping my way through every other gay man in the western hemisphere.  His two best friends on the faculty, one a US History teacher and the other a woman who taught “human dignity in the modern world” of all things, began a campaign to discredit my accusation.  The history teacher fed some story to an alumnus that I was a sexual deviant who was struggling with AIDS, had been raped by family members and was projecting my trauma onto an innocent priest who had done nothing but befriend me, a very troubled child…oh, and also this pathologically lying sociopath had recanted but the school refused to announce any of this because they were scared of my family.  I found out about this email because this alumnus sent it to every alumni in his graduating class from several years back, among whom was one of my friend’s older brothers.  My buddy came to me and told me about the email and showed it to me…and I knew I was in over my head.  I wasn’t equipped to deal with adults making up brutally vile fantasies in an attempt to attack a child.  They later created a fake blog that they claimed was mine, in which I was supposedly planning to kill the academic dean.  My father was called and told I was not going to be welcome back to the school pending an investigation into my “death threats” to the administration.  

Those were just two of dozens and dozens of attempts to discredit me and get me expelled from Prep, and many people I have met in the subsequent years who came forward had similar stories.  To make matters worse, the provincial had concocted a lie to protect Gary Orr…he had a letter sent to the entire Prep community that said Orr was being treated for Parkinson’s disease and that all of the rumors about him are ludicrous lies that are completely unfounded and untrue.  Mind you, in open court a decade later, I learned Orr was not being treated for Parkinson’s in St. Louis (which I already knew) - but he was in fact in a rehabilitation program for Jesuits who had raped children.

On and on and on and on and on and on it went.  So…how?  How do you survive this?  I had an entire community actively, and successfully, making me out to be a psychopath hell bent on destroying their community, and even the leader of the jesuits at my school was creating false narratives in an attempt to save face for the society and the school.  I was somewhat well protected…but I still was going to school every day, suffering insults and attacks, knowing that the faculty at my high school was split between people who hated me with a burning passion and those who silently believed me but thought standing by the sidelines while a 16 year old was called a sexual deviant and a pathological liar was the correct course of action.

I had no escape.

“Please, don’t make me wake up.” That was what my prayers had become.  I didn’t understand how something horrible could happen TO me and that I would then lose everyone I had come to love and everything I had come to know.  My parents were tireless in their efforts to defend me…but they loved that school.  We were all trying so hard to do as little damage to the school while making sure I survived this experience, but what ultimately happened is that I was thrown too the wolves by everyone in an attempt to keep the situation as quiet as possible.  Every morning that I woke up I was disappointed.  I have nothing and no one, that was all I felt.  I was no fool, I understood why this had happened and knew my part in it.  I could have said nothing, I could have let him go forth and molest more kids and continue to have the life I had, just diminished by a couple dark secrets.  That, however, has never been my way.  And so, I knew what I had lost and why I had lost it and it was unbearable.  The guilt and the shame and the deep grief was crushing me, a child whose charmed life had been devoid of any of those things until then.

It was not long after I had been accused of conspiracy to murder the academic dean (which had been quickly thrown out with a little IP address search leading us back to Orr and his friends), that I had my first compulsions to kill myself.  It was a funny feeling, really.  I didn’t feel despair when I thought of it.  I felt relief.  I was withering, every bit of me dying as I went day after day after day back to the lions den.  I was getting several death threats a week, I had become the most reviled person in our community.  In a nutshell, I am intimately familiar with the desire to die.

So now we get to my point in all of this.  We often talk about asking for help in these moments.  Call a suicide hotline, talk to loved ones, reach out to your family.  Well, I wasn’t interested in being told not to die, and I felt like I couldn’t go to my family as I had hurt them enough already.  I had convinced myself that this was a final kindness toward an innocent group of people that didn’t deserve to have me destroy their lives.  “Life-ruiner.” - that is what my old friends called me.  They called me other things as well…but that is the one that to this day I won’t forget.  I remember in my mind standing at the proverbial cliff’s edge, letting myself come closer to it, getting ready to let my mind fall into that dark chasm where I could go and forget and be forgotten.  I remember so vividly this moment, the moment when a hand, strong and confident, firm and kind, unyielding and unrelenting, took hold of me.  The hand that grabbed me and said “I’ve got you” and brought me back from the edge was not a friend’s, it wasn’t a parent’s…it was my own.

Learning 2 - you are your own hero.  Listen to me - I am speaking to those of you approaching that cliff.  People are going to disappoint you.  We are all messy, horrible creatures that are not capable of being as perfect as you will need us to be as you go forth to fight this battle.  YOU are the only person who will not you down.  YOU are the person who will love you unconditionally and will never leave your side.  I love my family, I love my friends, but I don’t need them.  In this battle, this war, I am all I need.  When you go to sleep at night and pray you don’t wake up, when you walk into the courtroom to testify against your rapist, YOU are there.  We cannot wait for anyone to save us because no one can save us…we can only save ourselves.  Ask for help - always.  But the help we need is not to be saved, it is to help give us the strength to save ourselves.

In that moment, the moment where I chose to live, something in my changed.  The little boy, so cheerful and goofy, was gone.  He had been gone for a while now, but I couldn’t seem to say goodbye.  In his stead stood a storm.  I knew in that moment that there was no longer anything anyone could do to me.  I had accepted the reality of who I was to the world, and I had embraced the reality of who I am to me.  Everyone I knew could scream their hatred for me to the heavens and back and I would be unmoved, for those things no longer mattered.  Regardless of what happened from that moment forward, I had my back.  Armed with that, I was ready to go to battle and take down a pedophile.  I had finally found God, and I found him not by looking up but by looking inward.

So what ultimately happened?  Well, when it came time for Orr’s trial, the Jesuit released all of the information they had on him to the police.  Volumes of false identities, hidden bank accounts, secret lovers, and most importantly other possible victims.  The moment the authorities had that, he pled guilty on all counts (yes, I know what you are thinking…if they had all this information why didn’t they give it to the police in the first place??  Please refer to learning 1).  I flew out to Maryland because I wanted to present my Victim impact statement to the judge herself in person, with Orr in the room.  I wanted to look him in the eyes one final time, prove to myself that I had forgiven the monster that hides in the closet, and make a point of saying in open court that more than anything it was the system, and Georgetown Prep, that I felt were culpable in my abuse and deserved the real blame.  Now that I know many of the other victims and their stories, let me tell you even the “best” of institutions still like to reduce anyone who threatens their reputations to ash, no matter the cost, no matter the circumstances.

So what happened afterward?  Well…not much changed.  The people who had hated me for “falsely” accusing Orr now hated me for “mishandling” the situation, the man who was at the time the President of the school had bene advised not to talk to me or any of the other victims, and so we were barred from communication with the administration…meanwhile, the school sent out a letter saying that they were shocked that this happened and did “everything required of them” in handling the situation.  What you come to understand when you are in our situation is that the lying never ends, for with all institutions the end justifies the means because the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Where do we go from here?  HA, that is the beauty.  Life.  In all of it’s exquisite tortures, and beautiful joys, you get to go and live life.  And you will live it with a deep understanding of humanity (a true gift) and an even greater appreciation for the joyful times in life, as only those who have suffered can truly understand.

To those of you who haven’t experienced this sort of disaster: I hope I have given you some things to chew on.  I can’t speak from a place of absolutes, no one can…but let me share with you something to think about.  If you are faced with this happening in your community, there are only two options: 1) the accuser is telling the truth, or 2) the accuser is lying, and in that case has some sort of severe issues.  Both are worthy of compassion.  The later sucks a lot because it makes things horribly hard for the rest of us who have actually been abused, but still…we must try to make the world a kinder place even in the face of adversity.  Please don’t attack accusers, even if you don’t believe them.  Those who ARE telling the truth are going through enough, and you never know when your unkind words may be the thing that ties the noose.

To my abused brothers and sisters: You have to get through these few moments and then you will see that “it gets better” is not just a slogan, it is reality.  I am not saying that you won't be marked by this experience…I am saying you will be and it will be ok.  Look, I have my issues, do not think for a second that I am trying to tell you I am walking through life some empowered perfect human being.  I am, and always have been, complicated.  I have a fierce love of others, and I have a great relationship with myself…and yet I can’t bring myself to read my birthday cards.  Seriously, not one.  As a matter of fact, if you try and make me read one in front of you, I will pretend to and then say “awww that is so sweet thank you.”  And it isn’t even conscious.  That, my friends, is weird as fuck…but tells you a lot.  I know I would sacrifice everything I have to protect the people I love, but will slap away their hands when they extend them to help ME.  That isn’t their job in my eyes, it is their job to go forth and live and my job to take the hits because I KNOW that I can.  I mean I could go on and on but I don’t want to discredit myself by dumping out ALL of my crazy, but you see what I mean.  At the same time, I am incredibly happy.  I have a beautiful life, very hard at times, but nevertheless I persist.  You can too.  Do it for yourself and everyone you love, and everyone who loves you.  Oh, and by the way, I see you, and I love you.  We got this.

Allllllllll right, I know that was all so terribly dark, but for those of you in the midst of this struggle, understand: I cam through horrific times and I am so deeply happy with life.  All the dark bits, all of the light bits…You will be ok.  It’s funny, now that I've finished driving down the shittiest of memory lanes, things have kind of coalesced for me in this way - after all of the crazy shit I went through, the insane, INSANE attacks, the loss of so many things that at the time seemed to mean so much…I took my hands off my eyes, looked around at the devestation, picked myself up and realized that these people could do nothing to me.  The Jesuits, the school, these people who hated my guts…they were completely and totally impotent.  The only thing that mattered was that small divine part of me that I had discovered, and nothing could touch it, and through it I was able to walk away with eyes and heart wide open.  They could only hurt me if I let them, and the second I understood that truth, I was invincible.  Let them hate and say horrible crap, they still do all the time.  I am free.

FURTHERmore…I have a life now filled with so many people that I love so deeply, in a way I never would have been capable of had I not survived that darkness of that terrible time.  Let me tell you, boys and girls, there is so so much to look forward to once you come out the other side of your harrowing.

LEARNING 3 I’ll end it on this note…forgiveness.  A lot of people define it a lot of different ways, but let me explain it to you from where I am standing, because it is the most powerful tool in my arsenal.  Forgiveness is NOT condoning, or reconciling, or forgetting, or placating, or denying the facts or even pretending you haven’t been brutally wronged.  Those things have nothing to do with it.  Forgiveness is the simple act of saying “You have no power over me, and I am letting go.”  You don’t need to say anything to anyone, you don’t need to confront someone, they could be dead for all the difference it makes.  Forgiveness is about YOU, and it is a choice.  Make it.  Make it every time.  If they have no power over you, they cannot push you off the cliff.

Jesus take the wheel that was the never ending shit storm of words.  I’ll end things here, since even I am getting sick of my poetic waxing around abuse haha.  So much love to you all.  

And if you are struggling and need someone to talk to, I am here.  I am always here.

Love, Eric

[theruyak]

PROUD

I remember when I came out.  Oddly enough, the memory becomes more vivid as I get older.

I was driving home from school when i resolved to tell my parents, but I had no idea how the hell I was going to do that.  So, the first person I called was my older brother.  He was the quintessential big brother, blazing a path that I had attempted (and usually brutally failed) to emulate as I fumbled through school.  He also was on the other side of the country living in San Francisco, so I didn't have to look him in the eyes when I told him this terrifying secret.  We was incredibly kind, as is his way and as I should have expected, assured me that there was nothing wrong with me, and then immediately said that he was flying home so that he could be there when I told my parents.  We never really discussed it, but the truth was while I knew there was nothing I could do to lose their love, we had no idea how they would react.  I had in my life never heard them say anything about homosexuality quite frankly, but they were devoutly Catholic and that made name incredibly stressed with regards to this particular topic of conversation.

Anyway, I told him I couldn’t wait for him to fly out.  I had found the courage in that moment, and I had to tell them as soon as I could.

My mom had had surgery on her foot that day, so she was high as a kite.  My dad was in pre-trial mode so he was incredibly busy and a little short of fuse, but I knew that no moment would be the perfect moment.  So I went into the family room and told them I had to talk to them.

“Well,” I mumbled, “I’m gay.”

Silence.

The next moment has become now of the most formative moments of my life.  To fill the silence, as I tend to do in almost all situations, the I spat out the only words that I could think to utter:

“I’m so sorry.”

And then my dad looked up at me, an edge to his voice, and he said, “Eric, you have absolutely nothing to be sorry for.”

At that point I burst into tears realizing for the first time that I was going to be ok.  You have to remember, this was 2002.  I had no one to look up to in the media who was openly gay and living any version of a life as I had imagined growing up in my family.  I was terrified - for the first time I didn’t know what the future held and I knew no one to whom I could look for answers.  I was going to have to go it alone, I thought.

So I share that story mostly to illuminate the reality I was inhabiting at the time.  Fear, confusion, humiliation.  I had been brought up in a family that was deeply loving, but also the all boys school I went to was one in which even the teachers said “fag” and “faggot” as though it was your given name.  To be gay was something of which you should be ashamed.  To make matters even more complicated, several months later I was sexually abused by my high school mentor, and when I came forward about that all hell broke loose.  Suddenly everyone knew that I was gay, and even worse the fact that I was gay was used by my abuser’s supporters to attack me.  

“Sexual Deviant.” “He was asking for it.” “Obviously it wasn’t abuse, the kid’s a faggot.”

That was some of the more gentle commentary.  So in a nut shell, I was the only gay person I knew, being demonized for it by my community, and all I wanted to do was stop existing.  I felt like everything I touched was going up in flames and it was completely unbearable.  

When I got to college, suddenly there were other gay kids.  There were gay adults, teaching.  I got my first dose of the LGBT community.  I went to a support group for kids who had been sexually assaulted and met even more members of the community.  I came to understand the beauty in the sense of solidarity for the abandoned, those that at the time our culture had all but criminalized for being who they are.  The challenges I described just now are common threads through the experience of being a gay person in America.

What many of my straight friends don’t understand is that most members of the LGBTQ community are bound by, among many other things, the fact that we had to come forward, “come out”, about who we are.  At the time this experience was rarely pleasant, and often times would lead to a tremendous loss.  Parents abandon children, churches kick parishioners to the curb.  It is sometimes a very dark, very ugly business, and we are bound by that experience, that adversity.  Ask an LGBT person about how they came out and you are bound to jump right into some emotional hurricanes.

So, Pride.  What does this have to do with Pride?  

Last year I was home for a trunk show and a buddy from high school wanted me to go out with a couple of his friends.  To be honest, as much as I love him, he is a douchey, lacrosse playing, vineyard vines wearing kinda DC bro, so I should have known his friends would be somewhat similar.  When he introduced me, he said that I was his good buddy Eric, who “is gay but you wouldn’t even know it.”

Time froze for a second.  I had been living in LA where none of my friends ever spoke like that, so this was the first time in a decade where I had to actually ask myself how I felt about being gay.  “You wouldn’t even tell.”  That Ruyak rage came boiling up, and I was both shocked and delighted that this was my reaction.  What, you wouldn’t even know that I was a part of a community that saved me, that is filled with some of the most fantastic, loving, wild, accepting, human beings on earth?  Yes, no community is perfect, but it IS my community, and I would be God damned if I was going to have some ignorant Trump-fuck saying anything pejorative about my people.

“What the fuck does that even mean?”  I said.

My buddy immediately started to back track, realizing that he was dangerously close to an Eric confrontation, which few survive, and his friends idiotically tried to save him but really only made matters exponentially worse.  One of them finally said, “look it’s not like anyone would choose it.”

I am grateful that he acted such a fool, because I realized then and there my truth:  I would choose it.  I would choose to be gay if I had a do over and had the choice to make.  I love my life, I love the people that inhabit it, I am proud of the person that I have become through the adversities I had endured, and I appreciate life and love in a way that I don’t think I could have had I been straight.

I will skip the colorful way in which I casually savaged these bone heads, as it is neither here nor there (Yes, I did mention that no self-respecting gay man would dress like a Duke lacrosse player rapist at the age of 30, but again, bygones), and just say that I am grateful I had the opportunity to really think about how important my “gay-ness” is to me.  It has given me a life filled with incredible people, experiences, and opportunities to fight for all of the above.

So…

I would choose to be gay.

I do choose to be gay.

I am proud to be gay.

And I thank the sweet baby Jesus, Muhammad, and the flying spaghetti monster every day that I was made that way.

Happy Pride.  Xx

[theruyak]

Pushing through the Maelstrom: On Losing Sophia and My Battle with Grief

I haven't written much in the last year.  Life is hard sometimes, in ways that demand emotional silence.  Sure, I'll post the few (thousand) political articles, and cat videos of course...but beyond that I have kept to myself as I evolved through a hard truth, one that I have been struggling with since a year ago today. March 31st, 2015 was the last time I saw my dear friend Sophia. Sophia was an incredible woman.  Having come from Germany in her twenties, she had built a beautiful life in Los Angeles.  She was wise beyond her 50 years, and was always my “go to” person when it came to discussing love, life, loss...basically anything profound that starts with an "L".  It was she with whom I discussed my relationship heartbreaks, and it was she to whom I have to thank for catching my metastatic SCC (a type of non-melanoma skin cancer).  I had a lot to be thankful for beyond the typical gifts of a rich, colorful friendship. And she was a friend of unconditional generosity, always giving of her time, love, and her self with no need or desire for anything in return. It was a beautiful day.  I was running to catch lunch with her at the Americana.  She loved that place, something for which I teased her all the time.  I was running late, which pathologically stresses me out, and as I was running into the restaurant she had been lying in wait to scare the holy Jesus out of me when I ran in.  I shrieked and threw my phone in her general direction out of holy terror, and she just giggled and giggled away.  It was always like this with the two of us, free-spirited Sophia out free-spiriting me, the two of us laughing till it felt like we had be beaten senseless. We sat down for lunch, and she already had a bottle of her favorite Frank Family Red Champagne chilling by our table.  There really was no out doing Sophia.  We spent that lunch talking about friends and family, how she had had trouble negotiating her way around a couple of friends who had been in town from Europe and who she felt had been taking advantage of her. I had had this conversation with her many times, for those who are generous of heart, mind, and especially with their time and money, are often taken advantage of by those who seem to be our friends but at the end of the day are not.  But she wasn't sad...her attitude was always that everyone is trying to be happy, and we shouldn't take it personally when someone steps on our toes in their attempts to do just that.   I believe my advice was "fuck 'em, you have enough friends."  I was more pragmatic and less romantic than She when it came to these sorts of things...but there in was the wisdom gap between the two of us and why I loved her so much.  People, even when they are really hard, are all that mattered to her. After a lovely lunch that went on for two and a half hours, I gave Sophia a bracelet set that I had made to match a necklace of mine that she had purchased the week before.  This is, in retrospect, where I should have seen it.   Her pain, her anguish.  She adamantly refused to accept the gift at first, which was very Sophia, and then after I berated her she said fine but she insisted on paying for it.  I flatly refused.  She then said she would at least pick up lunch, but I had already snuck the waiter my credit card.  I felt like I had finally bested her in the "taking care of all my friends" battle of wits...but she was genuinely upset.  I think I saw then, for the first time, that while she valued everyone for who they are no matter what...she had a hard time believing that people wanted to be with her for the same reasons.  I didn’t care that she was so generous - it was very nice and all and I knew it was how she showed she loved us, but it was unnecessary.  I loved her for her kindness, her intelligence, her firm and compassionate way of giving advice and of helping you through your darkest times.  But blind Eric didn’t see that all this time she had a hard time believing that these were the things everyone around her loved. I let the realization go.  Another time, I thought. As we were running by David Yurman, somewhat aimlessly as I still had several hours to kill before my evening trunk show, she stopped me and said that she wanted to by her husband Mark some cufflinks.  He had been away on a business trip for about 10 days, and she missed him terribly.  As we walked in, she elbowed me right in the stomach knocking the wind out of me, as Germans do, and she said "Whoa Schatzi, that sales guy is cute you should ask him out." He was 3 feet in front of us. As I turned scarlet, she got the cute sales guy to help her pick out some cuff links.  She was so excited to give Mark a gift.  This was what Sophia lived for - taking care of others and making them happy.  I know now that often that is how we deflect from our own unhappiness...and not the kind of unhappiness that grows for our circumstances, but that comes from truly dark relationship with our selves. We went over to Nordstroms so that I could by some more cologne, and she vanished for a minute.  As I was finishing up with my purchase, she popped up out of nowhere holding a Nordstroms bag.  "Here, now we are even!" she said excitedly.  I opened the bag and in was a deep purple Burberry golf shirt.  "I thought it would look so nice on you, with your pale skin."  We both laughed and, knowing better than to argue with Sophia, I accepted her beautiful gift.  To this day it is my favorite shirt. Suddenly she looked at her watch and realized she had to pick up her dog.  He had recently had surgery and she needed to pick him up from a check up.  In a rush, we gave each other one of our big bear hugs.  "I love you, Schatzi" she said in her bright voice with the sweet German accent.  "I love you to, Sophie." With that she rushed off to pick up her pup.  That was the last time I ever saw her.  I will forever remember watching her blonde hair bobbing as she ran off, her red purse barely missing a counter filled with make-up and how that made me smile.  After she was gone, that image became burned into my mind. I spoke to Sophia several times before she died that following Friday.   We spoke almost every day and texted incessantly.  We had made plans to hang out that following Easter as Mark wasn't back yet and she had made plans for brunch with this group of hilarious older German women she had known for years. I got the call that she had taken her own life Saturday in the late morning. Life is hard.  Life is always going to be hard.  That being said, it is concurrently beautiful and great.  My world shattered when Sophia left us, and I know my experience must pale compared to her daughter and husband, two of the loveliest people I have yet met.  That being said, I learned so many valuable things from Sophia, things that have come to define me as a man, not just little arm chair wisdoms.  Some of them are: 1)  People are entitled to your kindness.  I get it, sometimes we are not cups of tea for one another.  That being said, no matter how much you dislike someone, you must always act with kindness.  Do I do this?  No, I fail all the time.  But I aspire to be this way...and I have made great strides in this regard to be honest.  Sophia used to tell me when someone really hurt her, "it's ok...it is about them, not about me."  She couldn't have been more right. 2)  Family First.  This didn't just mean your blood family or spouse...this meant all of the people that make up your tribe.  I am unmarried, and I have lived far enough away from my family for long enough that they are no longer part of my day to day life.  I speak to my siblings, whom I love, very seldomly.  My family as an adult is a beautiful patchwork group of people who I have come to love more than my own life out here in LA.  Sophia was a part of that, and I just wish I had understood the things about love that I understand having survived Sophia's death. 3)  Everyone has an invisible battle you cannot even comprehend.  This is not an unknown idea, and it certainly isn't anything new...but I think understanding it is something that comes with age and experience. Sophia and I bonded over our troubled pasts.  She had a lot of dramatically difficult experiences as a child, and I spoke with her about the sexual abuse I experienced in high school.  However, talking about these things isn't the same thing as discussing the damage, the underlying patterns we have created for ourselves.  I know as an abuse survivor, I will always struggle with feelings of unworthiness - no matter how much I come to love myself, the expectation that you are unworthy of other people, or even any community, is an anchor from which it is very hard to free yourself.  Sophia has shared some of her traumatic experiences with me, but always said "Oh that was so long ago - I barely remember it."  I should have seen the deflection, I should have reached her more closely, I should have known better having been abused myself.   Kindness.  That is the thing Sophia brought out in me.  I was at times in my darkest placed while Sophia was in my life, and her kindness always kept me centered and a-float.  We should all strive to be the kindest version of ourselves...it's a hard journey to love yourself enough to be genuinely kind to all around you, but it is worth it.

Listen, I know grief is a royal fuck party that you aren’t invited to but somehow are trapped going to and in which everyone just throws stuff and you and you cry and then you set yourself on fire.  At least that is how I imagine it these days.  But know this:  you will get through it.  Allow yourself to be sad, angry, and hurt.  I know we try in our American world to avoid pain and grief...but they are incredible important.  To have a rich life, filled with love and gratitude, we must accept the pain of loss that will come with it.  Take it from someone who has lost 7 close friends in 10 years (Jesus Christ if you know me in real life RUN FOR THE HILLS!) -- It is WORTH IT.  We are only on this earth once, so love as best you can, as many people as you can, and when the time comes that we all dread, you will meet it head on and walk through it...not around it or away from it, but through it.  Be brave.  Love is really hard and it is really scary, but I can’t imagine who I would be without having had Sophia in my life, even for the brief time that she was.

I miss you all the time, Sophia.  I can't believe it has been a year since last I saw you.  You were the kindest person I had yet known, and the things I learned from your friendship will reverberate through my being forever.  I hope that wherever you are, you are proud of the young man I am becoming. Love, your Schatzi

[theruyak]

Pushing through the Maelstrom: On Losing Sophia and My Battle with Grief

I haven’t written much in the last year.  Life is hard sometimes, in ways that demand emotional silence.  Sure, I’ll post the few (thousand) political articles, and cat videos of course…but beyond that I have kept to myself as I evolved through a hard truth, one that I have been struggling with since a year ago today. March 31st, 2015 was the last time I saw my dear friend Sophia. Sophia was an incredible woman.  Having come from Germany in her twenties, she had built a beautiful life in Los Angeles.  She was wise beyond her 50 years, and was always my “go to” person when it came to discussing love, life, loss…basically anything profound that starts with an “L”.  It was she with whom I discussed my relationship heartbreaks, and it was she to whom I have to thank for catching my metastatic SCC (a type of non-melanoma skin cancer).  I had a lot to be thankful for beyond the typical gifts of a rich, colorful friendship. And she was a friend of unconditional generosity, always giving of her time, love, and her self with no need or desire for anything in return. It was a beautiful day.  I was running to catch lunch with her at the Americana.  She loved that place, something for which I teased her all the time.  I was running late, which pathologically stresses me out, and as I was running into the restaurant she had been lying in wait to scare the holy Jesus out of me when I ran in.  I shrieked and threw my phone in her general direction out of holy terror, and she just giggled and giggled away.  It was always like this with the two of us, free-spirited Sophia out free-spiriting me, the two of us laughing till it felt like we had be beaten senseless. We sat down for lunch, and she already had a bottle of her favorite Frank Family Red Champagne chilling by our table.  There really was no out doing Sophia.  We spent that lunch talking about friends and family, how she had had trouble negotiating her way around a couple of friends who had been in town from Europe and who she felt had been taking advantage of her. I had had this conversation with her many times, for those who are generous of heart, mind, and especially with their time and money, are often taken advantage of by those who seem to be our friends but at the end of the day are not.  But she wasn’t sad…her attitude was always that everyone is trying to be happy, and we shouldn’t take it personally when someone steps on our toes in their attempts to do just that.   I believe my advice was “fuck ‘em, you have enough friends.”  I was more pragmatic and less romantic than She when it came to these sorts of things…but there in was the wisdom gap between the two of us and why I loved her so much.  People, even when they are really hard, are all that mattered to her. After a lovely lunch that went on for two and a half hours, I gave Sophia a bracelet set that I had made to match a necklace of mine that she had purchased the week before.  This is, in retrospect, where I should have seen it.   Her pain, her anguish.  She adamantly refused to accept the gift at first, which was very Sophia, and then after I berated her she said fine but she insisted on paying for it.  I flatly refused.  She then said she would at least pick up lunch, but I had already snuck the waiter my credit card.  I felt like I had finally bested her in the “taking care of all my friends” battle of wits…but she was genuinely upset.  I think I saw then, for the first time, that while she valued everyone for who they are no matter what…she had a hard time believing that people wanted to be with her for the same reasons.  I didn’t care that she was so generous - it was very nice and all and I knew it was how she showed she loved us, but it was unnecessary.  I loved her for her kindness, her intelligence, her firm and compassionate way of giving advice and of helping you through your darkest times.  But blind Eric didn’t see that all this time she had a hard time believing that these were the things everyone around her loved. I let the realization go.  Another time, I thought. As we were running by David Yurman, somewhat aimlessly as I still had several hours to kill before my evening trunk show, she stopped me and said that she wanted to by her husband Mark some cufflinks.  He had been away on a business trip for about 10 days, and she missed him terribly.  As we walked in, she elbowed me right in the stomach knocking the wind out of me, as Germans do, and she said “Whoa Schatzi, that sales guy is cute you should ask him out.” He was 3 feet in front of us. As I turned scarlet, she got the cute sales guy to help her pick out some cuff links.  She was so excited to give Mark a gift.  This was what Sophia lived for - taking care of others and making them happy.  I know now that often that is how we deflect from our own unhappiness…and not the kind of unhappiness that grows for our circumstances, but that comes from truly dark relationship with our selves. We went over to Nordstroms so that I could by some more cologne, and she vanished for a minute.  As I was finishing up with my purchase, she popped up out of nowhere holding a Nordstroms bag.  "Here, now we are even!“ she said excitedly.  I opened the bag and in was a deep purple Burberry golf shirt.  "I thought it would look so nice on you, with your pale skin.”  We both laughed and, knowing better than to argue with Sophia, I accepted her beautiful gift.  To this day it is my favorite shirt. Suddenly she looked at her watch and realized she had to pick up her dog.  He had recently had surgery and she needed to pick him up from a check up.  In a rush, we gave each other one of our big bear hugs.  "I love you, Schatzi" she said in her bright voice with the sweet German accent.  "I love you to, Sophie.“ With that she rushed off to pick up her pup.  That was the last time I ever saw her.  I will forever remember watching her blonde hair bobbing as she ran off, her red purse barely missing a counter filled with make-up and how that made me smile.  After she was gone, that image became burned into my mind. I spoke to Sophia several times before she died that following Friday.   We spoke almost every day and texted incessantly.  We had made plans to hang out that following Easter as Mark wasn’t back yet and she had made plans for brunch with this group of hilarious older German women she had known for years. I got the call that she had taken her own life Saturday in the late morning. Life is hard.  Life is always going to be hard.  That being said, it is concurrently beautiful and great.  My world shattered when Sophia left us, and I know my experience must pale compared to her daughter and husband, two of the loveliest people I have yet met.  That being said, I learned so many valuable things from Sophia, things that have come to define me as a man, not just little arm chair wisdoms.  Some of them are: 1)  People are entitled to your kindness.  I get it, sometimes we are not cups of tea for one another.  That being said, no matter how much you dislike someone, you must always act with kindness.  Do I do this?  No, I fail all the time.  But I aspire to be this way…and I have made great strides in this regard to be honest.  Sophia used to tell me when someone really hurt her, "it’s ok…it is about them, not about me.”  She couldn’t have been more right. 2)  Family First.  This didn’t just mean your blood family or spouse…this meant all of the people that make up your tribe.  I am unmarried, and I have lived far enough away from my family for long enough that they are no longer part of my day to day life.  I speak to my siblings, whom I love, very seldomly.  My family as an adult is a beautiful patchwork group of people who I have come to love more than my own life out here in LA.  Sophia was a part of that, and I just wish I had understood the things about love that I understand having survived Sophia’s death. 3)  Everyone has an invisible battle you cannot even comprehend.  This is not an unknown idea, and it certainly isn’t anything new…but I think understanding it is something that comes with age and experience. Sophia and I bonded over our troubled pasts.  She had a lot of dramatically difficult experiences as a child, and I spoke with her about the sexual abuse I experienced in high school.  However, talking about these things isn’t the same thing as discussing the damage, the underlying patterns we have created for ourselves.  I know as an abuse survivor, I will always struggle with feelings of unworthiness - no matter how much I come to love myself, the expectation that you are unworthy of other people, or even any community, is an anchor from which it is very hard to free yourself.  Sophia has shared some of her traumatic experiences with me, but always said “Oh that was so long ago - I barely remember it.”  I should have seen the deflection, I should have reached her more closely, I should have known better having been abused myself.   Kindness.  That is the thing Sophia brought out in me.  I was at times in my darkest placed while Sophia was in my life, and her kindness always kept me centered and a-float.  We should all strive to be the kindest version of ourselves…it’s a hard journey to love yourself enough to be genuinely kind to all around you, but it is worth it.

Listen, I know grief is a royal fuck party that you aren’t invited to but somehow are trapped going to and in which everyone just throws stuff and you and you cry and then you set yourself on fire.  At least that is how I imagine it these days.  But know this:  you will get through it.  Allow yourself to be sad, angry, and hurt.  I know we try in our American world to avoid pain and grief…but they are incredible important.  To have a rich life, filled with love and gratitude, we must accept the pain of loss that will come with it.  Take it from someone who has lost 7 close friends in 10 years (Jesus Christ if you know me in real life RUN FOR THE HILLS!) – It is WORTH IT.  We are only on this earth once, so love as best you can, as many people as you can, and when the time comes that we all dread, you will meet it head on and walk through it…not around it or away from it, but through it.  Be brave.  Love is really hard and it is really scary, but I can’t imagine who I would be without having had Sophia in my life, even for the brief time that she was.

I miss you all the time, Sophia.  I can’t believe it has been a year since last I saw you.  You were the kindest person I had yet known, and the things I learned from your friendship will reverberate through my being forever.  I hope that wherever you are, you are proud of the young man I am becoming. Love, your Schatzi

[theruyak]

The Break Up: Letting Go of the Final Pages

I always wanted to be a dad.  For some reason, even as a young boy, I was fixated on the idea of bringing other beings into the world and teaching them all the grand things I would have learned and shielding them and nourishing with my over abundance of love.  All that kinda good stuff.  This desire, as I grew older, became a need.  And that need grew roots and started to take a more specific form, with specific requirements.  I had to do it young, so I could have as much time with my kids as possible.  I had to make a certain amount of money, so that they wouldn’t want for anything, ever.  I had to have a very important career, so they would be proud of me.  These needs were always there, weighing me down and pushing me further. When I met my ex, I thought he wanted that same things.  I knew he wanted kids and money, and I took that and ran.  This was my chance, I thought.  I projected all of these things that I thought I needed onto him, and after a while it wasn’t even him anymore, but an altered, sculpted version of the person I wanted to be with as I rode forward into the future that was entitled to me.  The saddest thing he said to me as he left, the last time I ever saw him, was “Eric, I just can’t provide you with the future that you want.  I’m sorry.”  No, I thought.  Tell me you don’t love me anymore and you hate me, tell me I am not good enough for you, tell me you found someone else.  Don’t tell me that I did this to us - that everything I thought was there was just my own nagging and selfish desires, too large and too overpowering to make space for the two living people in the room. That was my answer to the question “How did I contribute to this?” -  I refused to see him, I only saw what I wanted to see.  And it had crushed him and crushed us. Several months later, I stumbled upon something I had written when we were dating only for a year or so.  It was a journal entry that talked about the kids we were going to have.  I smiled sadly when I saw it, and was completely overwhelmed when I read it.  There was the oldest, a son.  He was very responsible and always worrying over us and the other kids.  More paternal than fraternal, he was the quintessential big brother that the other kids idolize.  There there were the twins - one girl one boy.  Always getting in trouble, but with the best of intentions, sneaking out late at night and going to parties and concerts…but we always knew they were safe because they had each other.  They still were constantly grounded, however.  Then there was the daughter, smart and quiet and introspective.  In a family of loud, irreverent and extroverted people she was the precious flower.  She kept to her books and music, but when she did speak it was always profoundly and everyone would stop what he or she is doing to listen to her.  Then came the youngest, a boy.  He had my wild hair and fiery eyes, and my ex’s wolfish grin…something I knew was impossible but when dreaming we must reach for the impossible sometimes.  He had my deep empathetic mind - something that was often more a curse than a blessing.  We were very close, because we understood the beauty and the burden of the big emotions and the big thoughts.  He was my favorite. I gathered up these pages and had an idea.  I decided to go up the coast to a remote area just south of Big Sur where my ex and I had spent a love-filled, romantic weekend several years ago.  It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen.  I put Sierra in daycare and began the long drive.  My chest was tight and my mind heavy as I made the trip up north.  When I finally got to the place where we stood by the cliffs and watched the waves beat the bare stone, I took out the pages.  I read them one last time, and sat watching the sun as it set across the pacific.  I didn’t want to let them go, but knew that I had to.  That life was gone, and it was never coming back.  I dug a little hole by an evergreen nearby, and gingerly placed the pages inside.  It knew it was just a symbol, and a somewhat dramatic one at that, but it felt like I was burying the 5 children I never would have.  I decided to drive home instead of spending the night, and in the darkness of that trip I accepted that I had to live in the moment and never trap myself within the prison of my dreams again. Then, 6 months later, something crazy happened. I was with some of my family and friends at a resort called Hillside in Fetiye, Turkey.  This place is truly incredible - as close to heaven on earth as I have seen.  The last night of our stay, something incredibly peculiar happened - something that I will remember for the rest of my life.  I woke up.  Or at least, I thought I woke up.  I turned and lying next to me was my ex - but he was different.  It was the man that I had created in my dreams for so many years.   A dream.  For the first time in my life, I had that strange sensation of knowing that I was in a dream, yet awake. “You need to go down to the beach,” the perfect said, “the kids saved us seats.”  I was stunned.  Without a thought, I jumped up and ran out the door.  “I’ll be down in a little while.” he said as I hurried down the steps to the shore.  Seconds, I thought.  I must only have seconds before I wake up.  I have to hurry. The resort was completely empty.  Not a soul was at any of the beach bars or lounging by the pool.  And then I heard the laughing.  As I rounded the corner, I was faced with four people who I didn’t know and yet had known my whole life. “Dad!  What took you so long?” said a young man, probably no younger than I.  All of them were grown, and somehow closer to my current age than to the age of children.  I stumbled, overcome.  My heart was so full, for a second I wondered if this wasn't a dream and I had died, drifting off into the life that could have been as my consciousness shifted into eternity.  I sat with them and listened, barely saying a thing.  They were talking about the things families talk about - the oldest brother lecturing the twins about findings jobs after college, the twins teasing their younger sister about her current boyfriend - she was so beautiful and carefree who could keep track after all.  It felt like I was with them for over an hour, laughing at their goofy, loving banter and lapping up the impossibility of the moment. “Oh dad, I was just going to go up and get you.”  I turned.  I knew this voice.  It seemed as though I had known it since before I was born.  Behind me stood the most impossible of all possibilities.  He had my wild hair and fiery eyes, and my ex’s wolfish grin.  I was frozen.  He came up to me, grabbed my wrist and said “C’mon, let’s go get a drink at the pool bar.” We stood at the bar and I listened to him regale me with stories of college, where he was a sophomore.  He spoke of family events and drama that had happened years ago, that somehow I knew intimately well.  A whole other life opened before me, one that I had known without knowing it.  My heart was bursting, life felt so perfect.  Then I found my voice and started talking.  I told him all I knew about everything, streams of words flying from my mouth.  How to survive your twenties, how important it is to love yourself, the many ways I came to learn what I was and who I am.  He smiled, listening intently as I rambled on and on and on.  This is my only chance to tell you everything I have saved for you to know, I thought. Suddenly, I felt it.  The chains that tethered me to another world, the real world, were dragging me away from him, from this.  From the family I had always dreamed of creating.  It felt like passing out backwards.  As my vision began to close, I realized that I would never be back. “Nick!” I said, suddenly knowing his name as if there was no other name it could have been, “this is the last time I am going to see you.”  I felt burning tears welling up in my eyes.  How do you say goodbye to everyone that matters? He smiled.  “I know dad.  It’s ok.  It’s time.”   I hugged him in the most ferocious hug I could muster, feeling reality force me away from this heaven.  I can’t leave this, I thought.  I might die if I leave this.  Please don’t make me leave this.  The last precious moment was upon me, and I looked up to see someone walking toward me.  It was he, the embodiment of all those perfect things I thought I wanted and deserved.  He smiled at me, and I didn’t know what to say.  What does the imperfect say to the perfect?  And then, as I slipped away from the Hillside of my dreams, I screamed words that came out of nowhere:  “Take care of them!” “Always.” He said.  He waved goodbye with sad eyes and our son’s wolfish grin. Suddenly I was wide awake at 4 am in the same bed from which I had begun the dream.  I threw on a shirt and ran outside in the darkness, not knowing what I expected to find but knowing I had to go to the shore.  Maybe I had willed them into existence, maybe they would be real.  If there is a God, please make them real.  I reached the empty, dark shore.  I stood where we stood and laughed and loved as a family.  I sat down, quiet.  And I closed my eyes, and something unexpected fell over me.  I drank in the deepest feeling of peace that I had ever felt in all my days.  I was leaving more than the sun and the shore at Hillside when we left the next day, and I was finally ready to say goodbye. I know, this is a very fucking weird story.  Believe me, I am living in the reality that one of the strongest and most impactful memories of my life is of something that never really happened - which is pretty bizarre.  I remember every moment of that dream more vividly than what happened to me this morning.  That being said, I learned something very valuable saying goodbye to the life that never would be.  I always had an agenda, a plan, as to what my life would be.  I would have the perfect person to make the perfect family and live the perfect life.  Whomever it was that I made this family with was obscured by the person that I wanted him to be to suit my needs, and that was my fatal flaw. Life is messy.  Life isn’t an equation to be worked out and dissected.  Too often, my lists of attributes obfuscated the things that really mattered.  I wasn’t living my life, and I wasn’t loving fully.  He had to be smart, come from a good family, well-educated, well-off, successful, attractive…the list could go on from here to eternity.  At the end of the day, what this break up taught me is to throw away the list.  Your heart will tell you if it is right.  By limiting ourselves to our laundry list of bullshit, we are missing out on the great loves of our lives. No, the kids that I imagined will never be.  No, the partner in crime I thought I wanted doesn’t exist.  By trying to force my ex into that roll, I refused to see him for who he was, all of his messy, imperfect perfection.   The greatest loves I have seen are usually surprises.  The best friend you quietly fell in love with and didn’t know it, the guy in class who always drove you crazy and somehow accidentally won your heart, the person with careless hair you sort of knew while growing up and ran into at your class reunion.  We just have to be open to it by living in the now, not the past that was or the future that never will be. At it’s heart, this experience, this thing that people fear so much - the break up - taught me this:  Love is everywhere if we choose to live in the moment and allow it to be whatever it is going to be.  It doesn’t have to be romantic, it doesn’t have to be that of a friend, it will be something unique that we have never seen every single time.  So put down the agenda, throw away the schematics, and live.   Just live. Xx, Er

[theruyak]

The Victim Complex: Putting Down the Violin

When I was in high school, I was sexually assaulted by my mentor.  Coming forward led to a total meltdown of the community that I had come to know and love, and I quickly went from being a cooky and lovable kid to the most reviled human being that institution had seen in years.  It was shitty, no doubt about it.  And as a kid, I felt like the whole world was arrayed against me, that this was so unfair, and that I was entitled to better. I never really share that - I am only doing so now to illuminate that as far as my life goes, this was some pretty fucking awful shit - and in the realm of modern American life, it was easy to say “this is the worst thing ever and how could this happen to me?” I had succumbed to the Victim Complex. Ok - if you feel like that, here is what I want you to do.  Get up, right now, and go to the nearest mirror.  Now stare yourself in the eyes for exactly 10 seconds…no more, no less.  Now slap yourself.  Hard.  You know what, do it one more time for good measure. I harp on this topic with people I care about a lot because it is something we can all control and more often than not it is the source of a lot of pain and angst in our lives.  Also, it is something with which I struggle often.  What we really talking about is the context within which we choose to view what happens in our lives.  Simple as that.  Being a victim means that you are actively choosing not to take ownership for your life, and it is the single most destructive thing in the way of true happiness. I am not saying whatever happened to you isn’t fucking awful.  Horrible shit happens all the time, and most of the time it is totally unfair, but what happened to you is a separate thing entirely.  I am talking about viewing the world through a lens by which whatever is happening around you is completely out of your control and has nothing at all to do with you.  You are the sad, unfair target of the world at large and you did nothing to bring it upon yourself. Let me share my wake up call with you.  When all this shit went down in high school, I become the “life-ruiner” - that is what people who had been my best friends were now calling me.  It is not an exaggeration to say that I set off a nuclear warhead in a seemingly perfect community and I was deeply hated for it.  I felt like it was so unfair that something shitty happened to me and now, coming forward, I am the one who seems to get most of the fallout.  Poor little me.  It wasn’t until TEN YEARS LATER, when the priest who had attacked me plead guilty to molesting multiple kids over the course of his 20 year career at my high school, that I realized his acceptance of blame didn’t make me feel any better.  It never was about who was to blame, it was about owning my life and the choices I had made.  Yes, I hadn’t chosen to have this creep go after me.  But, I had chosen how to handle it - and I was proud of what I had done, despite the pain and suffering that I caused myself.  THAT is what brought me closure and peace.  And that is when I finally transitioned from being a Victim to being a Survivor.   So what are the tell tale signs that YOU are being a victim?

 The Blame Game.  Are you blaming someone or something for your problems?  That guy, these people, the inanimate object in the corner of the room?  Stop it.  We come from a culture of blame, and it is such a total waste of time and energy.  I noticed when my Ex and I broke up 10 months ago, that was the first time I didn’t project ownership of my problems onto the “offender” from the onset.  I was so fatigued from that relationship I just said “whatever, I forgive him and I forgive myself and I am moving onto the next stage.”  And I was shocked with how at peace I became.  Who cares who did what to whom?  That doesn’t solve the problem, let me tell you.  Take ownership for how you contributed to your own happiness/unhappiness because that is the only thing you can control.

Feeling hopelessly helpless.  I know, life is hard sometimes.  Listen, that is how the cookie crumbles.  At the end of the day, you will survive it.  You may think that you need someone to show up and rescue you, but when everyone you know tries to save you and you still feel shitty, you will realize that at the end of the day the ONLY person who can pick your ass up off the floor is YOU.  So just choose to do it.  We are all doing the best we can, and sometimes we fuck up - don’t beat yourself up over it - just get up and try again.

Living in the Past.  Yes - this one is a bitch.  It is so easy to get tied up in what happened to you before that we manifest the same shit in what is happening to us now.  For me, the worst example of this is the grudge-holder.  It isn’t cool to hold a grudge, it is whiney victim behavior.  People fuck up - if you can’t forgive them that is on you, not on the person who wronged you.  Get the fuck over it.  Whether you choose to have that person in your life or not in the future is a different story, but life is way to short to worry about what the hell happened to you 6 years ago, or even yesterday - you need to focus on and enjoy the beauty of Now.

Self-flagellation.  This means hitting yourself with a whip - like that albino douche in the Davinci Code.  What I mean by this is constantly picking yourself apart.  Usually this is done in an attempt to get affirmation or sympathy.  Jesus, give it a rest.  I get it, you fucked up and you are so awful blah blah blah.  We all have faults and we all have things we aren’t particularly fond of in ourselves, so shut your mouth and focus on the good shit going on around you.  It doesn’t make you look humble, it makes you look like you are trying really hard to get me to give you a compliment - so you stop whining.  I know I know, I sound harsh.  But this is a wake up call not a love letter.  So stop this bullshit.  Now.

Focusing on the Problems.  I used to excuse this by saying I’m a “problem-solver” so I of course I look for problems.  Wrong.  More often than not, we CREATE problems that aren’t even there because we are trying to perpetuate the victim behavior above.  Whenever I notice I am doing this - I have a two step solution.  First, I ask myself what my goals are around this problem.  If I get in a huge fight with a friend, I ask whether or not I want this person to be a part of my life or not, and I am very honest with the answer.  Second, I try to find a solution.  Just the act of shifting your focus from the problems to the solutions will lift you up and make you feel so much better about everything.

Ok so listen - I am not Ghandi over here.  I fuck up all the time, and I am pre-disposed to falling into these traps.  JESUS SEE?  I was just down on myself.  Even while writing a thing about being a victim I make myself a victim.  But in my experience, those times where I finally chose (and it IS a choice) to take responsibility of my life were the times where I was able to find happiness and serenity, even during the most turbulent times.  For me, I have a buddy I know I can call and he will shake me out of it.  Yes, he lacks the gentle touch when it comes to calling me out on my shit…but, fuck it - you have to wake up and take ownership.  Life is short, whether we are here for 10 minutes or 100 years.  So tell yourself that you don’t have time for this crap, because you don’t. So…go forth, download that annoying yet catchy new Taylor Swift “Shake it off” song, stop blaming people for everything wrong in your life and move upward and onward!! See?  You feel better already.  Told ya. Xx, Er

[theruyak]

Be the Honey Badger

Before we get started, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg Now, let’s talk about what other people think about you - and how totally fucking irrelevant it is! When I was with my ex, something weird happened.  Really fucking weird.  He had/has this borderline pathological need to in some way be liked by everyone - it is a very common thing I have found.  I, on the other hand, for better or worse, didn’t really give a flying flock of fucks about what anybody thought of me.  That being said, when my ex and I got together he thought I was nuts and because I am apparently weak of will, I decided that he was right and I should start kowtowing to what I thought people wanted to see. My ex used to tell me how much his friends didn’t like me.  I mean, the reality is that I wasn’t particularly found of his friends - don’t get me wrong, they are all great guys…but he has one kind of friend:  the vapid gay man.  And I am sorry, there is only so much talking about drinking, dodgeball and drugs that I can take before the brain cells start committing suicide.  Regardless, I decided that if it was important to my ex, I needed to make these people like me.  I tried everything, I kissed their asses, threw parties, supported their stupid ass endeavors.  It was like pulling teeth.  And even though I later found out that for the most part they were all pretty fond of me, my ex kept telling me how much they disliked me.  I didn’t get it - WHY?  For the love of baby Jesus how much more did I have to do to be liked by a group of people who I could care less about? THIS is my point - I was so miserable because for the first time in my life, I was worrying about being LIKED.  I couldn't be myself - I had to be some kind of warped version of Eric that in some way reflected the distorted idea of what I thought they would like in a  friend.  At the end of the day, birds of a feather fly together - and this cooky turkey vulture doesn’t like flying with Canadian geese. This is a really fucking stupid way to live you life.  Here are my new personal rules for avoiding the trap of getting sucked into whether or not people “like” you:

Stop worrying about what people are thinking and worry about what they are doing.  It is impossible to understand the full picture of what another human being is thinking about anything.  You can’t do it.  Stop.  I used to waste so much time exhausting myself with what another person thought or felt about any number of things - when the reality is that I can never adequately comprehend all of the nuances of what a person is thinking or feeling, unless that person is myself.  And then I realized, if a person doesn’t like me much but still treats me with kindness and respect, should I act based on what I think he or she thinks or how she is acting?  We can’t always control how we feel about another person, but we are always in control of our actions - so I chose worry about that instead.  Why was I so obsessed with understanding why a group of people MIGHT not like me, when they were always great to me?  Insecure people fall down that rabbit hole - so don’t do it.

Give everyone the benefit of the doubt.  This one, while self-explanatory, is another “live and let live” attitudinal shift that has brightened my life considerably.  Being a trusting person is a choice - I know that it is hard sometimes if you have been burned.  For those of us who have been cheated on, I get it - trust issues.  Trust issues, however, are so boring.  Why would you assume because one person lied to you that everyone does?  I am an inherently trusting person, and when I was cheated on I almost lost that - I was second guessing everything.  But it was so exhausting, so I said fuck it.  Yes, people are going to lie to you.  Deal with it when it happens, don’t assume that it is happening in every interaction you have.  We waste so much emotional energy getting wound up about stuff that isn’t even happening.  Oh, you think maybe, MAYBE, this person is lying to you…and you spend all this time and energy analyzing it until you find out that the person wasn’t.  Jesus that sounds terrible!  If you have trust issues, let people prove you wrong and surprise you - it is a much happier way to live your life.

Live your life with the best of intentions and assume that everyone else is as well.  Listen, I know it is easy to fall into that trap where you think everyone is out to get you and the world is a harsh, cruel place where people lie, cheat, and steal.  Oh Jesus, get over it.  We have all been lied to, we have all been disrespected at one point, and we all have had our trust in others tested.  If you live your life with integrity, you will bump into and attract other people that life their lives the same way.  This is the great trick of life - birds of a feather fly together so go and build your flock!  When I decided that, regardless of how shitty people can be, I was going to go forward and live a kind, honest, and altruistic life - those were the variety of people I became attracted to as friends and those are the kinds of people that filled my life.  It is so much easier to be a Gryffindor than a Slytherin.  My ex used to call himself a Slytherin.  If someone does that…run.  People like that aren’t worthy of your time.

Make people work to LOSE your respect and love, not EARN it.  When I was younger, and more of an idiot than I am now (which is saying something), I used to think that for your love, affection, and respect to be special you had to only give it to a few people and they had to jump through fifty flaming hoops to get to it.  That was a silly and insecure way to look at life.  Today, when I meet you it is with respect and kindness - and with that comes the expectation that you will live up to it.  If you choose to value and acknowledge the best parts of people instead of their flaws, life is beautiful.  It is so easy to pick people apart and reduce each individual to the sum of his or her worst attributes.  Stop it.  That is something people do when they feel shitty about themselves in an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for his or her own shit.  Open your heart to people, believe me you will bring out the best in them.

You attract what you put out into the world.  This, my friends, is the crux of everything and the secret to finding the good life.  As Gandhi once said, “Be the change you that you wish to see in the world.”  I want to live in a world where people respect one another, love one another, cherish each other’s differences, react with compassion to one another’s faults, are filled with forgiveness, and have each other’s best interests at heart.  How can I live in that world if I am too weak to try to live my life that way?  The psychology behind how this works is so beautiful and simple.  As you put what you want out in the world through your actions, your value system changes and you begin to care more about these attributes over the sort of silly things you may have at one point.  Like for me, I am moved much more deeply when I see someone helping an elderly woman onto a bus than if I see someone receiving some kind of prestigious award or accolade.  I have been blessed with a life filled with incredibly people because I value those people that inspire me to be the best version of myself.

Listen, be the honey badger and don’t give a shit.  Escape the prison of your own mind and live in the real world.  Put awesomeness out in the world and that shit will slingshot around and slap you in the face.  In a good way.  I no longer have the time or energy to waste fucking with what I imagine is going on in someone else’s head - as I am sure you all can see now, I have enough weirdness to keep me occupied in my own scary mind.   I know some of you are going to say “but Eric, people lie, cheat, and steal.  They will hurt you and make you feel like you made a huge mistake trusting them!  How can I possibly avoid protecting myself by picking apart what I think his or her intentions are at all times?”  Oh Jesus, just take a breathe and stop treating people like they can break you so easily.  When you say that you have trust issues, or you are damaged, or you are broken - those are all excuses we tell ourselves to avoid the hard work of opening up and being vulnerable.  Yes, people will disappoint you.  Yes, people will hurt you.  Yes, people will make you feel betrayed.  They will also surprise you, make you feel loved when you least expect it, protect you, and lift you up when you feel like you are at rock bottom.  Let them.  You can’t experience the joy of true human connection if you are trying to protect yourself from the bad all the time.  People take advantage of me sometimes - so what?  That is about them, not me.  I refuse to throw the baby out with the bathwater - I want to live a life filled with intense, powerful relationships  and the road to that place is paved with assholes.  But who cares - stop worrying about the assholes.  This is where the honey badger comes in.  If someone is an asshole, just say fuck it, and move on.  Don’t give a shit, keep your eye on the prize and build the life you want.  Just remember, if you ARE an asshole, you will be surrounded by assholes.  So stop being an asshole, forgive all the other assholes, and start surrounding yourself with non-assholes! That was not the most eloquent way to make that point, but let’s be honest - I don’t think the honey badge would parse his words either. Xx, Eric

[theruyak]

Picking up Pieces - Part 2: Getting the Dog in the Divorce

When my ex Howie and I rescued our dog Sierra, I made a promise.  It wasn’t one he had asked me to make, and he was annoyed with me for even making it, but I promised him that if we ever broke up that he could keep the dog no matter what, no questions asked.  I did this because when he had broken up with his last ex, his ex had changed all the locks and thrown Howie’s stuff out on the street like a total wackjob, and worst of all, he had kept Howie’s dog.  It had crushed Howie - he talked about the dog periodically and it was always with tremendous pain in his eyes.  So I vowed that I would never do that, because I loved him - and besides, we were going to be together for ever and ever and ever… So, when Howie came home and dumped me, the one of the first things I said was “What are we going to do about Sierra?”  I had promised, I had sworn that I wouldn't fight for her.  If he had said to me "well I am taking her because she is my dog," I would have said OK.  I would have let him.  I would have been losing the two most important living things in my life at once, but I couldn’t look myself in the mirror knowing that I had broken this promise.  Even though he had broken up with me, I still loved him and couldn't hurt him that way just because he had hurt me, no matter how deeply. “I can’t take her from you,” he said. “She’s yours.” I got the dog in the divorce.  The dog he knew he could have taken with no strings attached.  I have clung to that moment since the breakup. All of my friends have told me I am crazy.  After all - I worked from home and he didn’t, I was the one that paid for her food, brought her to the vet, made sure she was groomed.  Yes, all of those things are true.  But I know Howie.  He wasn’t doing those things BECAUSE I was doing them.  He would have stepped up and figured it out.  He could have stayed at his sister’s home with Sierra and made it work until he had his own place.  He let me keep her because he didn’t want me to be alone as he moved on to his next great love - because he HAD loved me, even at the end, even though he had already moved on to someone else. The reason this moment in time is so important is that it made me grow up.  Your ex is not the devil.  Leaving you does not make him or her a horrible person in it of itself.  We are all doing the best we can to be happy with what is in front of us.  Yes, sometimes we make stupid decisions.  Yes, sometimes we hurt people.  However, if you make the decision to except that truth that everyone is doing the best they can, even if it is messy, you are free to forgive.  At the end of the day, you choose whether or not to live within the story that your ex is a bad person worthy of your hate.  I have played on both sides of the fence and these are the two options: Option one:  Your ex is evil - what a total bastard.  How could someone leave you?  YOU?!  You had given this person your heart and love and total self.  The only possible explanation is that he is a stupid, miserable, hateful bastard.  Totally worthy of being hated. Option two:  We are all trying to be happy as best we can, and this is what he thinks he needs.   Listen well, because this is the greatest thing I have learned in my 28 years:  hatred only hurts you.  So break the cycle.  Hatred is a CHOICE, no matter what you have told yourself.  Sadness, pain, anger - those are emotions that come and go.  Hatred isn’t emotion, it is a state of being.  And you are bigger than it is, so let that shit sink to the bottom of the ocean. I am not some hippy dippy love love love proselytizer - everything I write I have experienced in practical application.  From a purely pragmatic point of view, hating others is a poison that makes you incredibly unhappy.  It is the ultimate example of cutting off your nose to spite your face.  People hurt you, leave you, and make you feel small.  You win when you choose not to hate them.  Make the choice to think about those moments when you got the dog in the divorce.  Those memories of better times.  Things are complicated, reducing a relationship to the worst moments or its sad and tragic end does not honor that fact that at one time, you LOVED this person.  Yes, it ended, but chose to see the kind and happy times and abandon those moments that culminated in the break up. I had packed all of Howie’s things into boxes and given him until February 15 to pick them up (not realizing it was the day after Valentine’s day…that was really fun.)  On the 15th I had slept in and woke up in a panic - I was supposed to take the dog and go to my parents place and meet my friend Melissa for lunch.  He was supposed to be there any minute, so I rushed out, leaving the place in shambles.  I had packed up all of his stuff in boxes because I wanted to start to make the place my own and I really wanted our things separated, so he didn’t have a ton of work to do - just pick it up.  At lunch, I started to feel sick.  Melissa, who is like a sister, held my hand and told me it was going to be OK and told me that feeling horrible about this stuff is normal.  She offered to come back to my place with me, but I told her I needed to do it on my own.  I needed to do everything on my own for a while. When I got home, I opened the door and felt the last bindings tethering me to my old life evaporate.  Empty apartment.  He is gone.  He really is gone.  I had never felt so alone as I did that day.  I went around, checking to make sure he hadn’t inadvertently grabbed something that was mine, which he hadn’t.  Hoping he had left something by accident, something I could keep as a remembrance of the last four years.  He had not.  And then, when I went into the bedroom, my heart stopped. He had made the bed.   “You always forget to make the bed, Egret,” he used to say.  “C’mon you’re a big boy now.” With that goofy grin, burned into my mind.  I had forgotten to make the bed that morning because I was in such a rush to get out - and it was something I had done every day since we had broken up as a symbol to myself that I WAS  big boy now and I COULD make it.  But I was in such a rush that morning… He had made the bed. I had spent so much time and energy forgiving him and forgiving myself, but all the while I still thought so poorly of him and thought he was just a heartless jerk.  I was forgiving him for being a shit head, but that wasn’t what I needed to accept and forgive.  I needed to forgive him for being human, for wanting more, and for trying to be happy.  For wanting to be happy in a world without me in it.  And now, I was faced with the reality that he is just like me, just a guy trying to find happiness in a complicated world.  I forgave him right then and there. He had made the bed. I sat on the floor and let out a sob that I had been carrying with me for 6 weeks.  Sierra came over, tail wagging, and sat down next to me with her nose in my face, licking away my tears. It's all going to be OK. 

Xx, Er

[theruyak]

On Love.

I am a very off-putting friend. First of all, I trip and fall a lot.  I am not sure why, although I am convinced I have some kind of neurological problem.  So it’s always awkward when I fall down in front of my friends, usually into complete strangers.  Second, I am at any one time having 5 conversations:  3 with my friend/s, one with myself, and another with an inanimate object somewhere in the vicinity.  Seriously, even I have a hard time following whatever bullshit comes out of my mouth.  I just have so much to say!  Third, sweet baby Jesus I am loud.  Soooo loud.  Lastly - I say I love you, out of nowhere, a lot.

This might seem sweet, but it can be confusing.  For example, if we have been friends for a couple months and we are getting off the phone and I ever so casually say, “Ok, good night!  I love you!” for the first time - it will catch you off guard.  “Does Eric have a thing for me?  Oh God, he’s a great friend but there is no way I could date someone who looks like poor man’s Lee Pace and has a nervous tick!  Also…Jesus, those eyebrows.”  Nope!  I just love you and I said it! Self-deprecating truths aside - feeling free to love the people close to me with reckless abandon, without wasting energy worrying about limitations, conditions, or exactly to what extent they love me back has led to the happiest time of my life.  Truly. Ok, so first of all, if this is the key to happiness, let’s define happiness.  Happiness is a state of fulfillment and serenity within the context of you life experience at large.  Tadaaah.  It is not an emotion.  Sadness, anger, hatred, even fucking ennui - those are all passing moments within the fabric of your life - but happiness is the material that makes up the whole damn quilt.  There are only two “quilt” making options - happiness and suffering.  Therefore, if we accept that, emotions like sadness and anger, though they can dampen your feeling of happiness, can exist side by side with it. So, if we are working on that definition, how does love get you to this state?  For me it took a complete 180 in perspective.  I grew up thinking that the point of your personal life was to find someone who loved you - to be loved was the goal.  God, how much anxiety have I created for myself living out that narrative?  That, my friends, is a losing battle.  You strip yourself of any agency in making yourself happy because the only action you have is to scramble looking for love in all the wrong places. So when I broke up with my ex, I abandoned the old way of thinking because it clearly hadn’t served me, and I decided that instead of worrying about being loved, I would focus on loving as much as I could, as best as I could.  NOW we have a game plan!  I could focus on connecting with others and focusing on celebrating those connections as they grew and deepened. This is so easy, let me tell you.  All it requires is that you slap pride in the face and let yourself be vulnerable.  Here are my new rules for Love that have brought happiness to my life like I never could have imagined.

Loving Unconditionally.  This one is easy to define but harder to practice:  love others without conditions, parameters, or expectations.  For me, this was all about humility.  I no longer am worried about loving someone more/less than they love me for the sake of pride.  It is so exhausting analyzing how other people feel about you.  Who cares!  So maybe I love all my friends more than they love me…so what?  Does that make my love any less vital, or true, or special, or real?  Does that make our relationship have less worth?  Not at all.  My love for another human being is for me to cherish and do with as I please, it is not something that needs to be put before a panel or a judge.  Furthermore, I don’t think you can qualify love that way.  The experience is different for each person in each unique relationship.  I used to have so much anxiety, worrying if my friends valued me as much as I valued them.  Then, at my lowest moment after the breakup, when I felt like no one valued me at all - I realized that my choices were to live a life without love in it or swallow my pride, embrace humility, and love people regardless of how they felt about me.  And I was free of so many pf the demons that I had carried with me for decades.  Be free of conditions when it comes to those you love - those never serve anyone but your own insecurities.

Love Freely.  Ok, I hate to break it to ya, but your love don’t cost a thaaaang.  When I was younger, and arrogant, and filled with pride, I thought that in order for my love to be special it had to be something that was earned.  It had to be fought for, and only certain select people were allowed to experience it. This is literally the opposite of the emotional reality and experience of love.  Here is a little secret:  every love is special.  Every love is completely different.  The more people you let yourself love fully, the more intricate and valuable your heart becomes.  Don’t treat your love like the hope diamond, treat it like water - something infinitely more vital and readily available.  Instead of the old Eric, whose respect, love, and affection you had to earn -  the new Eric gives those things freely, and you have to work hard to LOSE them.  And if you DO lose them, one heartfelt apology and all is forgiven.  It is such an easy way to live.  Such a full and happy way to live.  And now, I understand how multi-dimensional love is.  When I was growing up, a Jesuit priest told me the meaning of life is to increase you capacity for love.  I never really understood that until today.  The heart is like a balloon that you can blow up and up, and even though you think there is no more room it will never pop.  With me, when I think “Shit, I love so many people I don’t think I could love any more than I do now,”  I meet someone awesome and boom, more love.  It’s addicting.  And the fuller your heart grows the happier you become.

Love Fiercely.  For me, I have this weird experience that lets me know that "oh shit I love this person"…It’s my death/savior experience.  While I am daydreaming, out of nowhere I imagine a car going out of control and headed toward us, and it always ends the same way: I throw the person to safety while being obliterated in a moment of love and glory, and as I am dying I say “I love you go live your life!”  This is REALLY fucking weird, but what is actually happening is that I am understanding that I would put this person’s needs before mine without hesitation.  That is what loving fiercely is.  If you love someone, that love has to be supported by action.  I always tell people, I love freely, fiercely, but never lightly.  Love can’t exist within the confines of some kind of limitation or boundary - it doesn't need it.  If you love someone, don’t be afraid to say it.  Someone has to say it first.  And don’t be afraid to act like you love the person.  Help him with his car when it breaks down, practice his lines with him for his next auditions.  Put your arm around him at his mother’s funeral.  We are built to love and connect with people, and expressing it is as important as feeling it.  And the more we do it, the deeper our love grows.  I always laugh when people think “well what if he/she thinks I have a thing for him/her?”  So what?  Just say you love the person but you aren’t romantically interested and move on.  Love is love is love.  It doesn’t have to exist in the context of a sexual or romantic relationship.  Love is limitless, not limited, so stop limiting it.  As you can see, I’m not a fan of limits.

Now, being loved is incredible, I know.  But my point is that “being loved” is a totally different experience that exists apart from loving another person.  Victor Hugo said “To love another person is to see the face of God” because loving others IS what creates fulfillment and serenity in our lives.  He didn’t say “you better find love or you will end up an emaciated, hairless, Anne Hathaway dying of consumption in the streets” now did he?  No.  And if you develop your capacity for love, one day the right person on all levels will bump into your life and you will be able to actualize a loving, emotionally rich and secure relationship. Full disclosure, I will tell you why this is so important to me.  I am very uncomfortable with being loved.  I don’t really know why, It’s probably some residual martyr complex - fucking Catholic guilt.  The great struggle of my life has been trying to understand how I can possibly be happy if I have such a hard time accepting that other people might love me the way I love them.  And so, from that place, I stumbled upon the great truth of my life:  loving others makes me happy.  Yes, the law of averages says that it is likely one day that I will find someone who matches my insanely intense, quirky, somewhat off-putting variety of love with the same verve, but I’m not worried about it.  Being able and choosing to love the people in my life - that is happiness.

OK one more point...Here is the great secret.  After I just spent all this time trying to convince you that loving others is more important than being loved, guess what happens when you love the living daylights out of people?  It comes back.  You get back what you put out in the world.  A recent interaction with a friend went something like this:

Eric: "Ok see you at 7.  I'm so excited!  I love you!"

Buddy: "Ok, sounds good.  Calm down, you weirdo.  I love you too."

Eric:  "Awww...you do?"

Buddy: "What?  Yes, you idiot.  Of course I do."

Often we tell ourselves other people don't love us because we are living out our own messed up narrative.  Put that shit out there, and just wait and see what comes back.  Love breeds love.  Love is like a beautiful puppy-mill, but instead of unethical over-breeding and poor treatment of animals, the people you love and who love you multiply exponentially!  ...That analogy sucked, but it's hard to think of a decent analogy that involves the word "breeds" so give me a pass. So go out, love someone.  Love a stranger!  Wait, no, don’t do that.  That would be weird.  But I think you know what I mean, right?  After all…It was Anna that defrosted her own frozen heart with her love for her sister Elsa, right?  NOT true love’s kiss.  Ok Disney, slightly redeemed. And if you don’t get that reference…oh fuck it, I still love you. Xx, Er

[theruyak]

Picking up Pieces - Part 1: The Tiger and the Cage

When I was 18 and went to college, I had a motto (clearly I thought that was a cool thing to do back then…because I was a tool).  That motto was “It’s better to live one year as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep.”  I even had it as my email send off for God's sake. In my hubris, I perceived myself as some kind of tiger bounding through life.  Passionate, quick to anger but also quick to love, with a voracious appetite for life.  Wild, impulsive, aggressively affectionate.  I liked perceiving myself as someone who couldn’t be chained down:  a force of nature.  I don’t know where I heard that tigers had volatile, manic, and loved life, but for some reason that symbol worked for me.   After my college relationship ended, I started looking for someone who could meet my crazy personality on an even playing field:  and that was when I met my last ex.  Let’s call him Howie - because that name is stupid and I like Irony.  He pursued me hard - we met through his sister who had become a good friend of mine.  I called him out when he acted too cool for school, and he stood up for himself when I tried to overwhelm a conversation with one of my myriad non-fact based opinions.  He told me I looked better in person than I did on Facebook and that he loved my rampant non-sequiturs.  He knew exactly what to say and I was, for the first time, excited.  And when he wanted to see me again every day after that I didn’t fight it.  Another tiger, I thought. I was so young.  I look back at the silly guy I was and smile sadly at him - he was so full of life and so ready to take on the world and so excited because he had found his match.  And there, my friends, was the tragic downfall.  That first month, where I decided that this was as good as it was going to get: a brilliant, fit, funny guy who adored me, ME of all people - that place, 5 years ago this November 2nd, was where the relationship was doomed. Somehow, the tiger that couldn't be captured, willingly walked into a cage - a cage that he built for himself.  And after being in there for a couple months, Howie quietly closed the door and locked it, keeping the key for himself.  The things I loved to do started to bother him, and when he told me to shut up or stop doing something, I did it.  I lived under the constant threat that he would leave if I didn’t acquiesce to what he wanted.  And why shouldn’t I hand him the keys to the kingdom?  I had found a brilliant, fit, funny guy who “adored” me - ME of all people.  But…who am I again?  It was getting harder and harder to see myself outside of the context of this relationship.  “Shut up, Eric.  You sound uneducated” became a favorite teasing barb of his when he was joking.  I would smack him and he would grin.  I thought I loved him so much, I DID love him so much…but what I came to discover is that I loved being in the relationship more.  It took me half a decade to realize that he was never joking. We would laugh and joke and tease like people in love do.  And we would fight - oh how we would fight.  But for some reason, with him, I would give up.  I was so scared that if I stood my ground and he didn't like it, he would leave.  And he noticed that.  I remember the day he completely disarmed me - we got in an argument in my parent’s place about one of his friends of whom I wasn’t fond.  He said “Well if you don’t like my friends, then maybe this won’t work.”  I hesitated, he saw me flinch first, and he knew he had me. My other friendships began to atrophy.  They hadn’t been fallen for the sad, emaciated animal in the cage - they had come to love the tiger, roaming free, making irreverent jokes and teasing everyone he loved in an attempt to get them to play.  There was no more play - play is something stupid, uneducated people do.  “Shut up, Eric” - not said so much as a joke anymore.  Howie hated my friends.  He liked “fun” people who talk about drinking and sex and dodgeball, and he liked being the Harvard guy in the room.  I liked people who would play with me, that’s all I wanted.  As equals, who would snip back the second I threw a goofy bit of snark his or her way.  Who would debate with me over politics, and religion, and what our weddings were going to look like, and where we were going to send our kids to school.  Who saw me for me.  Howie couldn’t have that.  So he told me to stop playing with them.  And I did - for this brilliant, fit, funny guy who I thought adored me - ME of all people, a stupid loser.  A loser who didn’t know when to shut up.  After all, I always seem to sound uneducated.  I can’t let this guy go, not now - not ever.  Because how could anyone else love me?  My one chance at love.   Broken. How quickly we become shadows of our former selves.  Years later, when Howie broke up with me, there wasn’t a whole lot left in the cage.  A mangy, shell of the creature who had once looked at the world and it’s endless possibilities with the courage to take on armies and a heart as big as the sea -  a guy who used to fight for his friends, love fiercely, flash blue-green eyes and a wicked grin at whomever would spar words with him.  Now, hollow and haunted.  As he said that he was leaving, I summoned the last remnant of the tiger I had been and said “Then go.”  It was the last vestige of the boy I had been, before the sad man I had become. My two best friends, Val and Ben, were Howie’s least favorite.  He was terrified of Val, a confident, intelligent young woman who would burn down a forest if it looked at one of her friends the wrong way - and he looked down on Ben, whose capacity for kindness makes limitless look limited.  This couple had been my two best friends in LA for years, but I had grown distant because Howie wanted nothing to do with them.  The first person I called when I got dumped was Ben.  Val was away with her family in Mexico, so I sent her a text saying it was over and that I would talk to her when she got back.  I went over to their condo, and Ben, ever filled with compassion, let me sit there and say nothing.  I could not put words to the shame I felt.  My passion for life, something that had been such a part of my identity, had been so carefully stripped from me over 4 years - and once there was nothing left I was abandoned alone in my cage to finally die.  Even though the cage was now open, I didn’t know how to leave it.  I didn’t know how to do anything.  I had become so accustomed to making no decisions, and to telling myself “Shut up, Eric - you sound uneducated” that just letting myself slip away seemed the logical choice.  But Ben is the guy who will sit next to you on the bench in the park while your head is in your hands and just put his arm around you for however long you need it.  I felt safe for the first time in years. Then Val called.  I hadn’t cried, not yet.  Grey, dead eyes don’t cry easily it seemed.  But hearing her voice when Ben answered the phone reminded me:  You had abandoned these people.  Your family.  You had locked yourself in a cage and told them that their services were no longer needed - all because your boyfriend had viewed Val’s loyalty and fierce love as threatening and Ben’s kindness and gentle confidence as weakness.  Ben handed me the phone, and Val said gently “E, I’m coming home.” And I put my hand over my mouth and started sobbing, heaving up all the shame of 4 years, 4 years of making bad decisions, setting horrible priorities, and being a disgraceful friend.  A disgraceful friend to them, and more importantly to myself. Over the next week, Val and Ben coaxed the broken tiger out of his cage and day by day, piece by piece, helped pick up the pieces until I remembered how to do it myself.  It wasn’t long before the Tiger was limping around the apartment, and pretty soon even playing again.   I tell this story for one overarching reason:  I had lost myself in this relationship and that had been it's tragic downfall from the beginning.  Howie, with his stupid made-up name and all, wasn’t some monster who came along trying to suck the life out of me - I gave him the power and the ability to do it.  I made him the monster, which in turn made both of us absolutely miserable, and I take full responsibility for doing that to us.  If I had entered the relationship valuing who I am as much as who I am with, we most likely wouldn’t have dated at all.  But, knowing what it is to be caged is a very valuable lesson, as well as remembering that there is more than blood when it comes to family.  Don’t ever undervalue yourself or the people you love because of the person with whom you are IN love.  Great people do find great people, romantically and otherwise.  Your friends are your friends for a reason - cherish them.   Don’t be the tiger in the cage.  There is no one on God’s green earth who is worth your imprisonment or loss of identity.  The second you think “this is as good as it gets, I can never do better” - first, slap yourself hard.  Second, ask if YOU are telling yourself that, or if your significant other is.  Because if the person you are dating is making you feel that way, know that a dead chicken you found in a dumpster would have a better prospect.  At the end of the day, Howie was not happy with the person I had made him - he didn’t want to be the keeper of the sad little creature in the cage.  He had fallen in love with the wildfire that couldn't be tamed, not the husk of a creature he had come to own.  And with the best of intentions, I had changed the name of the game, and it had broken us. I am glad to say, to his friends chagrin, mischievous Eric is running around like Tigger with Tourette’s, poking fun at himself and everyone else in reach.  Now that he has found himself again, he has created an army of people to cherish who happily play with him.  His eyes are kinda greenish blue again, now with a stormy tint, and he’s chasing after whatever great adventure the moment brings. And hopefully, he will help unlock a few cages along the way, too. Xx, Er

[theruyak]

The Break Up - Part 3: The Three Wisdoms

Allow me to explain this picture:

A couple weeks after my break up, I went on my first date.  It was incredibly bad.  I was in walking distance of my apartment, so I thought it would be a good idea to have 3 glasses of wine to cut the awkwardness and stumble home.  When I got there, two of my best friends, Val and Ben, called me to tell me something they had heard through the grapevine...that my ex was dating someone.  After 12 days of being broken up.

I promptly turned and without thinking punched his $1500 TV.  Oops.

SO:

A) Don't leave things you care about in striking distance of an Irish ex.

B) Please take me off any pedestal or high horse. 

Ok, so now that we have established that I am crazy, I want to talk about the major things I learned that empowered me to move forward from my breakup with the freedom to live my life with a heart that was full and open.  I have read so many books, articles, blogs, and essays about breakups.  They all are filled with tricks and little bits of wisdom meant to help you avoid or skip the shitty part of having a broken heart and get back on the horse/ready for "love".  I think all of that is BS.  First of all, you aren't broken or damaged, you are wounded - so get over feeling like a shattered mirror.  That thinking does not serve you, and that is just the story you are choosing to inhabit.  Furthermore, I completely reject the idea that grief is the opposite of happiness.  On the contrary, I think grief is necessary for true happiness, and essential to the experience of true love.  So here I will layout the three great life lessons that have lead to the happiest and most love-filled time in my life.

1)  Grief is a gift.  Yes, I capitalized that fucker.  GRIEF.  I grew up thinking that grief was like a great white shark in the world of joy and was to be avoided at all cost.  I thought that it was the antithesis of happiness, and when we are caught up in it's grasp we better hunker down and pray for daylight because who even knows when we will get out of that shitstorm.  We all have felt that way, right?  Powerless.  When we are dumped, for one.  Or when we didn't get into the school we wanted.  Or when you ask someone out and they say fuck off.  Or when a loved one leaves us.  Well listen, stop running from grief.  Embrace it.  When you experience loss, people say a lot of irritating things that are, while true, completely unhelpful.  For me, people would say "it's ok to feel sad, that mean's you loved him."  Really?  No shit.  Thanks Confucius, I feel all better now - excuse me while I go meditate under my peach tree and wait for enlightenment.  I think this statement completely misses the point, whether it is true or not.  Grief is the price of love.  We try not to think about it, but people die, people leave us.   Without the context of grief, love means nothing - there are no stakes.  And if you embrace it, the joy that you love someone so much coexists beside the pain of loss.  So, if Grief is the price of love, ante up mother fucker and leave a big ass tip on your way out the door. 

2)  We yearn to love, not BE loved.  The need to be loved is a bullshit Disney animated feature throwback that you have to get over.  There is this misguided notion that "all I want is to find someone that will love me the most in the world."  Let me, as a person who is incredibly uncomfortable with being loved in the first place, dispel this for you.  Yes, being loved is nice.  But what we FEEL is how much WE love others.  The desire to be loved is actually the desire for permission to love someone else with your whole heart.  Why wait for permission?  Why do you need to meet someone with whom you can build a romantic relationship to love another with your whole heart?  Stop it.  Stop that bullshit, you are just being scared.  The day I said fuck it, I'm going to love people without expectations of reciprocation, without conditions, and without any need to be anything to that other person was the day the happiness with my new life was born.  Stop asking for permission.  We become addicted to loving someone and then we go through withdrawal when we break up.  That, I think, is why we get so crazy when we like someone a lot and they aren't interested - We are DIEING to love someone.  So love your friends, love your family, love your pets, love everyone within reach - and don't be insecure about whether or not they love you as much or in the same way because that is just pride being a fuckhead.  As someone somewhere once said, ask for forgiveness not for permission.

3)  You are complete.  Commit to this idea:  you may never find one person to be with for the rest of your life.  Pfew, feel better?  Talk about ripping off the fucking band-aid.  If you are trapped beneath the need to be completed by someone else, I can guarantee two things:  You will never find the right person to be with and you will have an incredibly difficult time letting go after your breakup.  Another silly thing that people say when you break up with someone is "when you meet someone else you will stop being sad about your breakup."  That is some stupid fucking advice.  Look in the mirror for God's sake - I mean, don't cry like I did because that is a whole other box of weird, but honestly - stop trying to be one half of a whole.  YOU ARE A WHOLE!  Stop telling yourself you are damaged, or you are broken, or that you need to be fixed because of your breakup.  Come on down from your cross, you are just sad because you are a human being who has been gifted with the power to love others and your little heart is bruised.  Take responsibility for your life and who you are and move forward knowing you own that shit.  The second you accept that you are not a victim, and you are not a martyr, and that love is a funny thing that sometimes sets us on fire (in great ways and hard ways), that is the second you start letting go of what was and begin to dream of what will be.  And that dream starts now.

Years ago, a very wise Jesuit once told me he knew what the meaning of life was.  I asked him, WHAT IS IT I AM 18 AND ANGSTY AND DON'T WANT TO MAKE ANY MISTAKES!!  And very calmly, with a little Jesuit smirk, he said "The meaning of life is to grow our capacity for love, and to help others do the same."  A break up is not the end of the world and you are not going to die.  You are going to look around, pick up the shattered pieces of your little world, and start giving your heart freely and with abandon.  And then help others to do the same.

So...try it.  Right now.  Let go of the past, take out your phone, and call someone you love and say it.  Welcome to the first steps toward the rest of your life.

See you on the other side.  :)

Xx, and with lots of love, Er

[theruyak]

The Break Up - Part 2: Great People Find Great People

A little while after my ex broke up with me, I decided to do a little test.  One morning, I went into the bathroom, turned on the lights, and stared myself dead in the eyes. 

Say “Eric, I love you” I thought to myself.  Nothing came out.  Jesus Christ, just say “Eric, I love you”.  Still nothing.  JUST SAY IT! I screamed in my mind.

“…Er…” That was all I got out before I fell apart and started bawling.  Houston, we have a problem.  Go and try it right now yourself - it is a LOT harder than one would think. Many of my friends would tell you that they aren’t surprised about hearing a story where I am talking to myself.  That being said, self-love has always been a challenge for me.  And with this breakup, I finally was forced to accept what a huge problem it truly was. How does this fit into my break-up and the quest for happiness beyond?  Well, several months before that lovely experience, my younger brother Crippy married the love of his life, Brit.  At their wedding I gave a speech where I shared something my father had said to me after my first big break up, many years before.  “Eric, don’t worry about finding someone.  Great people find great people.”  How then, armed with this wisdom, had I missed that my ex had already moved on to someone else months before the break up, and the dreams that I clung to so vehemently were all unraveling under my nose? Well…because I’m not great.

I was a well-educated, smart, funny guy with a great career ahead of him.  And at that point, I was foolish enough to think those things made me great.  And so what did I look for? The same thing.

This is the point I am trying to make:  my definition of greatness was wrong.  Over the next several months, the old criteria for what was “great” melted away as I finally understood what actually mattered in life.  How can you love the right person if you are valuing the wrong things?

So here I will spill my guts and show how my value-system changed.  (Feel free to judge my original list as harshly as possible…Lord knows I have.)

He is well-educated.  This was code for “he went to a good school.”  In the last several years I have met people who didn’t graduate high school and yet are smarter and more intellectual that I am by a landslide.  My original criterion was a reflection of the elitism and pride that I had let fester inside me as I became an adult.  This one changed into he challenges me.  I am more interested in someone who meets me half way and helps me grow into a better version of myself intellectually and emotionally, and for whom I can do the same.  I don’t care if he grew up under a bridge and went to school in a shack.  I’m Irish, for God’s sake - my people didn’t realize they could walk around on two feet until the late 1800s.

He is driven.  Oh this one.  This is a real doozie.  This one is “he will one day make a lot of money.”  (I am not painting a good picture with regards to my emotional depth here.)  Here is how this changed - after the breakup, I sat down and asked myself, what do you want in your life?  How much will that cost?  Well…at the end of the day, I don’t need a big house, or a fancycar, or the nicest of clothes, etc.  I want to be able to travel to see the people I love and experience new things WITH the people I love, and I want to have enough money that if the opportunity arises I can afford to be a dad.  That doesn’t require the Rockefeller fortune, so why worry about making all the money in the world?  I also made the decision that I was going to provide that life for myself.  It’s hard enough to find someone who doesn’t want to slit my throat, why worry about how much money he makes?  This became he is passionate.  I don’t care if he makes pennies or billions, he has to love what he does.  Growing up among lawyers, I have to say for the most part there is a correlation between making tons of money and being a totally unhappy douche.  We all have to remember money is a tool, not the goal.  It is a better tool than poverty, of course - but if you spend your life running after it you become tired and miserable from chasing something of which you will never have enough.

He wants to have kids.  Oh yes, Eric.  Because the money hungry, elitist sociopath you have been describing so far would be father of the year.  I have stopped worrying about this - if it happens I would love it, but sometimes these things become impossible no matter what we want.  I spent time asking myself, what does this even mean?  What are the qualities in a father that I would want in a partner?  And then I realized…He is kind.  Simple, but completely essential to greatness.  A guy holding his daughter’s hand as he walks through the park, a dad carrying his son on his shoulders through Disneyland.  A middle-aged man hugging his child with tears in his eyes as he says how proud he is on college move in day.  Truly, this is greatness.

He is physically attractive.  There is a difference between infatuation and love.  It used to be that if you had a six-pack and Clark Kent looks I would ignore all the other bullshit and just “deal with that tomorrow…I’m sure he’ll change.”  What I have learned since my break-up is that looks are a silly thing to worry about.  For me, the hottest guy will become completely unattractive if he is cruel, insecure, and vapid - and someone who I may have overlooked will become my newest obsession if he exhibits kindness and depth.  Don’t worry, you will know if you are attracted to the right person - listen to your gut.  Do you have any idea how many times you have left-swiped the love of your life on Tinder?  Lord knows I have.  This criterion didn’t get a change, it got the axe.

He is confident.  This one isn’t as embarrassing as others, but I did have the wrong perspective on it.  Often I mistook arrogance and a cocky attitude as confidence instead of what it really is - insecurity.  Now, a guy who will tease me as quickly as he will tease himself is all I need.  He likes himself.

Now…here is the one that I added.  If you are keeping score, my idea of "greatness" has gone from an arrogant, physically attractive, elitist money grubber (also known as the anti-christ) to someone who is passionate, kind, challenging, and secure in himself.  The last one: 

He loves himself.  How can someone be on YOUR team if he is not on HIS team?

And this, folks, is why I said I’m not great yet.  It is the culmination of a lot of work and patience.  When I said I wasn't great, it wasn’t about looking for sympathy or playing the martyr - I am just now, at the age of twenty-eight, admitting that I have a problem.  I like myself.  I am very passionate about my life and the people I have been blessed to have as a part of it.  I am deeply challenging (keep the snark to yourselves).  And for the first time, I value my inherent empathy and my capacity for kindness above all else.  But self-love remains a struggle.  The entire point, however, is that it is a war that I am happily waging.

When you go through your great break up, the most beneficial thing you can do is ask yourself “how did I contribute to this.”  Don’t be a victim and scream “how could this happen to me!” and don’t beat yourself up either.  For me, my definition of greatness was completely wrong.  I valued the wrong things, the things my head told me I should want instead of the things my heart was telling me I needed.  And as such, ended up in the wrong relationship. The beauty of this process is that greatness is unique to each of us.  What are the characteristics of your ideal self?  Work toward it.  There is a poem that I heard after the split that I will try not to butcher here:

You look up,

Into the sky,

Through the clouds,

Passed the stars,

Beyond the universe, For that person who will make you complete.

Look down.  Gaze into yourself.

You are the one that you have been waiting for.

Isn’t that fucking beautiful?!  JESUS I love it.  This is where I found my happiness - in the journey to greatness and becoming the next, better version of myself.  As the old saying goes, it's not about finding the right person - it is about being the right person.  Actually, that isn't an old saying - I made that up right now.  But you get the drift.

Become the person you want to fall in love with, and believe me - he or she is closer than you think. 

So no, I am still not "great Eric," and I haven’t tried that horrible, God-awful, terrifying mirror thing again.  Not yet.  But the other day, I caught my own gaze in the mirror and for the first time in months, I was able to look myself in the eyes.

And I smiled.

Xx, Er

[theruyak]

The Break Up - Part 1

"We need to talk when I get home."

That was the text that I got on a Monday morning in January from my boyfriend of four years, with whom I was living.  We had spent the previous six months planning when we were getting engaged and where we were getting married.  There are few things that one can receive in a text message that are worse.  "Hey there!  I hate your guts you fucking moron - I hope you die" would have been preferable - at least that wouldn't have been so patronizing.

Even though for me this was coming completely out of the blue, I knew what it meant.  He came home that day and barely said hello and went straight to the bathroom to shave.  Avoiding me - not a good sign.  I told him we had to talk right now, and he came out with his white facial mask on.  "Well...like this?"  I didn't care that he looked like a fucking mime.  At least the last image I would have of him as he dumps me would be one of him looking like a total idiot.

"OK...we are breaking up." he said.

And that was that.  One of the few things I knew at that point is that if someone is willing to dump you out of the blue, without any conversation whatsoever, after four years together...there is nothing to save.  We talked about logistics.  I gave him a month to get all of his things out of the apartment.  I was keeping Sierra, our dog.  He packed up some things for the week and left.

I didn't cry.  Not then.

The next evening, things started to sink in.  I had never lived by myself, and now I had no choice.  I had never been fully responsible for something else, and now I had Sierra and no one to help me.  How had I become so weak?  I couldn't do it, I thought.  I don't know how, I don't know where to learn.  I am such a pathetic loser.  You are everything your ex said and thought you were.  He was right.  He was right to discard you without a conversation.  It was a tough day.  I started driving to my friend Ben's place, and in the car it hit me like a ton of bricks.  That soul-crushing, heart-rending feeling that accompanies the thought "I just wasted 4 years of my life."  This is where I learned for the first time that in moments like this, you make a choice.  My choice came hard, fast, and very clearly: The first road - to take the path of bitterness, resentment, hatred, and self-loathing.  I just wasted all this time and have to start over.  You are so pathetic, to be dumped this way.  How could anyone love someone like that - just give up.  It is going to take years for you to even pretend to like yourself.  Give up.  You are worthless, a castaway - just like he said.  Give up.  The game is over.  You will never be happy.

The second road - Forgive him.  Forgive him now.  Forgive yourself.  For fours years, you were happy.  You thought you had what you wanted.  You were wrong, but in those moments you were in love and many people never get to feel it.  Mourn that, mourn the end of a chapter.  But forgive him.  Life is short, appreciate that you loved someone and move on.  Forgive him, yourself, and forgive the situation.

It is a choice.  And for the first time, it was the choice I made coming out of the gate.

FORGIVENESS is the single most powerful aspect of love in the face of tremendous adversity.  There is nothing anyone can possibly do to you that you cannot defeat with forgiveness. 

The first thing I would like to point out about forgiveness is that it has NOTHING to do with the person who hurt you.  You do not need for the wrong-doer to apologize or ask for your forgiveness - it is not about bestowing something on someone.  Forgiveness is the act of saying "I refuse to take this with me - I am accepting it for what it is and choosing to move on."  That's it.  Presto.  The next time someone really pisses you off, forgive him or her.  You don't have to say anything, just chose to let it go.  My ex dumped me out of nowhere, took up with a 19 year old college sophomore.  And forgiveness gave me the perspective I needed to not just be OK but wave goodbye and be happy.  Listen, I was certainly pissed and mortified, but I took it for what it was:  he was seriously unhappy, and in trying to be happy the best way he knew how I was the collateral damage.  Forgive it, because holding onto resentment only hurts you, and hating people doesn't give you the power to teleport your ass back in time and change the facts of your life.

Now, let me make this ABUNDANTLY clear...forgiveness is the act of changing your attitude toward someone or something that has caused you offense and pain, grave or otherwise.  Forgiveness is not: excusing, condoning, pardoning, forgetting, or reconciling.  Forgiveness is an attitudinal change by which you wish someone who has hurt you well.  It is incredibly difficult at times, but it is a voluntary and intentional experience that has to do with your feelings toward an individual.  I forgave my ex, but that doesn't mean I want him anywhere near me, my life, or the people I love.   My priorities have changed since we were together, and the man I knew has no place among the people I love today.

The hardest part, however, isn't forgiving the perpetrator of the crime.  It is forgiving yourself.  For me, the feeling of guilt and failure at being "cast aside" was brutal.  However, the second I said "Eric - you are doing the best you can in the moment.  Don't hate yourself for not seeing it coming and don't beat yourself up because you were in the wrong relationship.  Learn from this, and live to love another day."  Just thinking that freed me from the soul-crushing darkness I could sense around the corner.  Yes I was still sad, yes I was still hurt.  But I was grieving the end of a relationship now, not grieving the death of my identity and dissolution of my worth.

Listen, I use this all the time because I fuck up all the time.  Oh my God just ask any of my friends.  I'm a huge fuck up!  I am deeply spontaneous and impulsive, and the byproduct of that is a lot of "oh shit" moments.  So I tell myself:  Eric, forgive yourself for inadvertently insulting your friend.  Forgive yourself for not working as hard as you should have on that project.  Forgive yourself for not being there for the people you love.  Forgive yourself for falling for your friend.  Forgive yourself for not telling that friend because you were scared.  Forgive yourself for being scared.  Forgive yourself for tripping over Sierra because you were texting your current fling and falling into that group of Korean college students in Westwood.  Forgive forgive forgive.  It's a reflection of our capacity to love - both toward ourselves and others.  And it is one of the greatest tools we have in our arsenal.

The only major obstacle to accepting forgiveness is actually a very challenging one, for our Ego doesn't want us to forgive so easily.  Pride.  Pride is the enemy of forgiveness and the enemy of vulnerability.  It screams for vengeance in the name of "fairness" and "equality", but really it only leads to an erosion of our ability to trust and love ourselves and one another.  It wants for you to think "this hurts - I am never going to do that again" when what we should be thinking is "well that didn't work out - let's see what we can learn and try again!"  Self-love is essential to a happy life - but pride isn't self-love, it is about comparing ourselves to one another when we should be loving each other.  It sounds so trite and deeply sappy, I know.  And I hate cheesey shit.  But at a time that could have been my lowest moment, I turned toward love and forgiveness and not just survived but thrived through the end of my relationship.

Take a breathe.  You have worth.  Your ex has worth.  We are all trying to be happy and trying to do our best.  Live in that world, accept and commit to that wisdom, and forgive. 

Now, go wake up tomorrow, make a million mistakes.  And relish every single one of them.

Xx, Er

[theruyak]

BRAT - a child, typically a badly behaved one.

Hey there, brats!

My name is Eric Ruyak.  I am a twenty-eight year old, jewelry designer who graduated from Northwestern University in 2008 and dates men.  Despite all the myriad nuances, millions of triumphs, billions of mistakes, and several cataclysmic life events - that is pretty much me in a nutshell as far as the greater universe at large is concerned!  :) 

Oh, and I have a crazy little husky mix named Sierra that I treat like a human.

I decided to write this blog because this year has been the messiest, craziest, hardest, most transformative year of my life - and regardless of my borderline desperate attempts to pretend I am in control of anything, I am the happiest I have ever been.  In my 28 years, I have fallen into and out of love, witnessed a community implode around itself amongst abuse scandals, and lost people with whom I thought I would spend my entire life.  I have also experienced profound varieties of love the likes of which I couldn't imagine, triumphed against adversity the likes of which I never dreamed would test me, and evolved out of the depths of insecurity and self-loathing into my favorite version of myself to date.  I have broken hearts, had my heart broken, cried in the rain, cried in the car, cried on the floor, laughed in a church, fought, given up, run away, faced the music, and been paralyzed in fear and indecision.  Yet through it all, I somehow managed to make it to 28 and smile at/inspite of myself.

In essence, I am just a guy who figured out how to be happy.

This blog is an amalgam of stories, both new and old, through which I found my way into an imperfect, goofy, too proud, brave yet terrified, glorious mess of a human being who at the end of the day loves the life he is living and those with whom he is living it. So take a look - and know that at the end of the day, I rarely take my own advice, love to contradict myself and others for the sake of it, and revel in being a snarky, teasing, affectionate, royal pain in the ass.  Both yours, and mine. So hide yo children hide yo wife - here we go.

Xx, Er