There is an old saying that “only fools charge in where angels fear to tread” over the last quarter of a century I have heard a variation of that from a great many instructors, supervisors, and friends. The question is what does that mean? To me the context of that phrase is that you should never go into something without a plan and knowing the risks of whatever you are about to do. Whether that is standing up in front of your co-workers to give a presentation to planning a dynamic rescue of 13 year old girl being held captive by a serial child molester in his cold war era bomb shelter. I make no secret that many years of working in EMS have effected me in many ways, some of which are good, some of which are bad; but all of them a part of the book of my life.

This blog is going to become the new record of my journey back to the light, maybe one day someone will read it and find a little bit of hope for a better tomorrow, it will be jumbled and likely hard to follow for some people, but I am using it as a tool to get my darkness out. The hardest thing I have ever had to come to grips with is that I will never have my old life back, never again will I be able to work on an ambulance, my days of saving a life with my skills are effectively over. hiking through a woods across uneven and treacherous ground has come to an end, much of my options for hunting are gone, and running toward the sound of danger to protect lives has been curtailed. I have spent over 5 years lamenting everything I lost, all of the wasted years, and all of the adventures I so badly wanted to go on are never going to happen. I had promised Mrs. ZM a trip to Japan for her 50th birthday, but I couldn’t make that happen, what she doesn’t know is I truly want to go there, I want to see Kyoto, I want to go to Hiroshima and pay quiet respect to those who were lost when my country unleashed a devastating weapon on them, I want to ride a super high speed train in a country that is known for its cleanliness and hospitality, but I don’t want to be a typical American tourist because I don’t like people like that. When you spend years thinking you have lost everything, you start to believe it, you lose yourself, you start to feel like you are just occupying space, when you spend that time being told you might be able to get your hip repaired several times you are not really allowed to come to grips with your situation because someone keeps filling your head with hope. A person starts to become bitter a good person starts to lose their light, and they become unrecognizable in the mirror, and then the cycle repeats itself until that person is no longer willing and able to see anything good in the world.

For me I have gone a very long way down into the darker parts of me the parts I try to keep from my family and my friends, the parts of me that only come up when I lose control , and I have lost control a lot, I had said and done things I am not proud of, and hurt some people along the way. There is very little I can do currently about this until I get myself better, there isn’t a magic pill that can make me all better, I take many different pills to make me feel less, which helps me process what i am feeling, the problem is that those meds also make it hard for me to feel much of anything, literally my concept of right and wrong is distorted, I did discuss with my psychologist about stopping my meds so I could face my problems head on, she told me that this was not something I could just batter through in a weekend of intense primal screaming and destruction of property, but a journey to regain my sense of self. The journey to finding myself again is something I can grab onto, a fight that I can win, because I have friends who wont let me falter, wont hold back when I am falling again and tell me I’m being a dick and ask me why and what happened, maybe I am fully aware of what I am doing and trying to set something down and leave it behind, maybe I just need to eat something or take a nap.

This weekend Mrs. ZM and I are going on a little trip to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary, that poor woman has had to put up with me for 2 decades, the only living thing that has had to put up with me for that long is my plant i got when I was a pre-teen, its like me hard to eradicate.

I am also going to try my hand at bonsaiing a Barberry bush as a symbol of my journey, it will be very hard to do in doors, the plant will be quite prickly, but in the fall it will have a glorious fiery color, which will make Mrs. ZM quite happy.