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technical difficulties, please stand by

this year has also been a pretty big change for me personally. last fall (for a variety of reasons) it was in my best interest to put the pbe on indefinite hiatus.  the simple answer is that i wasn’t interested in the long rebuilding process after carl stronach (nyc in 2007) and bruce gallego (stockton in 2008) left for greener pastures. overall i was really happy with the level of performance we had achieved and thought it was a good time for a break.

with the absence of the continuous cycle of rehearing and performing i also started to realize that i had been neglecting my personal health for years and really needed to get a handle on it.  so while this past year i might have seemed creatively fallow, i have been working on the underlying causes of these problems and i’m now getting the proper professional help which has helped me begin a path to a much healthier physical and emotional lifestyle.

i hesitate to say i’m ‘in treatment’, maybe because of the old fashioned stigma that is attached, and because i don’t want to make this about sympathy for my recovery. i think one of the reasons i’m writing this is to make the point that no matter how we try to “control” things life happens. it would be easy to make this blog and my group a projection of the facade of the best side of myself, but i have recently realized that part of getting older is that you know more people who are struggling with the darker parts of the human condition (pain, loss, depression, etc…), and i don’t think its honest or healthy to pretend i got it all together. all i know is that i tried the best i could for the last 30 years using the only coping mechanisms i knew (practicing, performing, composing and food), until i got to the point when i realized i couldn’t dig myself out of this hole.

i’m 40 years old and weigh about 344 lbs and know i might not live much past 50 if i don’t change my “lifestyle”.   on the other hand i have learned i’m pretty lucky as these things go; i surprisingly don’t have a bad body image, haven’t yo-yo dieted (which can really frak up your body) , and don’t have serious health problems like diabetes and heart problems (yet). its easy to see that if i don’t start losing weight i know that its only a matter of time before my health will decline and i won’t be able to reverse it. my big problem is that my main coping mechanisms (to deal with the shit in my life) have never been much in moderation (practicing, performing, composing and eating) besides learning how to “change my lifestyle” the main crux of treatment focuses on the root/underlying causes of my overeating (which is only a symptom).  getting a handle on the food part has been much easier than dealing with some dark times in my past.

when i started this i had no idea it was an addiction. i thought the lack of self control was a weakness and didn’t realize its really a symptom of not being able to process my feelings and emotions properly.  of course a lot of this goes back to when i was a kid (which i will gladly spare you the details), and when i got older i always thought i could get out of that box by succeeding at “adult” things (like getting married, being good in my job, performing, composing, and making CD’s), but in reality i realized that my skills in managing to navigate daily life wasn’t going to fill that hole and realized i need to get help. through therapy i also have become aware of the world of anonymous recovery blogging which has been very helpful for me. it basically works like group therapy; by seeing people at different stages of recovery it helps put my own recovery in perspective.  if you haven’t been exposed to this world i think your eyes would be quite open to the inner lives of people who are struggling to find their way.

in the last 30 years this is the first time i haven’t made or created music on a daily basis and have struggled knowing that most days my desire to make music has disappeared.  rationally i know this is temporary because “i’m taking care of business” and  i’m really looking forward to being in a place where i want to compose and perform again.  in the meantime i have started some “lower level” musical activities like learning acoustic guitar and and have recently been able to return to mixing the alt-classical CD. i’m really proud of the pbe and the music we made and i’m looking forward to sharing it with everybody soon.  i wish that we were still together, but know that the breakup of that group gave me the time to contemplate and make these important changes in my personal life.

writing this blog has been a great platform to share my music and ideas (and i plan to continue that), and although i might check in from time to time to give you an idea of how things are going, i’m not going to use this blog as platform to discuss the daily successes and failures of my treatment and recovery because i have to do that work on my own.

“I wake up in the middle of the night in a sweat. I am gripped by the knowledge that i have nothing to say- That even if I could write a pamphlet everyone in the world would see, I would fail” Jenny Bitner, The Pamphleteer

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 at 3:34 am. It is filed under Uncategorized and tagged with alt-classical, health, hiatus, human condition, pbe, recovery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.