JB Smiths Blog – Author @ books4free.com

Outside of getting sober, the darkest nights of my life were after I got divorced. There is just something so breathtakingly horrible about losing your family. For so long they had been everything I’d lived for, fought for, breathed for, and then one day, they are gone, and it’s just an entirely different bleak world. Leading up to our divorce was four very rough years of hellacious arguing, mad drinking, fighting, violence… I remember noting how good or bad we’d been doing based on how often the phones would need to be replaced as they would inevitably find themselves thrown up against walls, usually being dodged, having been aimed at skulls. This didn’t make for a peaceful home, or family life and it must have been hell for my former wife to endure my antics and my raging alcoholism.

I love this quote below and it’s on my Facebook page, and I think it applies to almost all alcoholics and probably artists as well:

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

–Pearl S. Buck, novelist, Nobel laureate (1892-1973)

Man that sums me up. It’s why I’ve run basically, or set the bar so high it’s impossible to reach from everyone I’ve met this year. I’m tired of the pain. This poem is about that pain while I was married. It doesn’t even begin to explain the dark hole of misery and pain I felt once actually divorced, but EVEN in the marriage I was tortured. I wonder now, at 33 if I’m even truly capable of  being in an actual relationship. Everything is so intense in sobriety, and I couldn’t even handle women medicated.

Haha, I stutter through a couple of key places, so funny I have no problem speaking to hundreds of alcoholics in speaker meetings, but put me in front of a camera and I become a bumbling idiot. Well that poem is also chronicled in the book and you can read it with a little better rhythm than I display in the video blog.

It’s funny, now when I lose a relationship, I lose them all. From my first kiss, through the divorce to the last one, the latest, it’s just all the same pain. Why does love feel so individual but the pain feel so uniform? In my mind it’s a scab I’d just been picking at that once opened, just rips off a deep scar, and reopens a wound barely done healing. It took me six months to stop waking up in sweats in anger, fear and jealousy over the last significant loss. I really don’t think I ever want to do that again. It really isn’t worth it to me. And also, my son is now 15. That means in 3 years I’m done paying child support and I can go anywhere on God’s green earth. Hell I could take a job washing dishes and just write full-time, not bothering with the marketing sales headaches. The freedom to do what ever.

Most people do not age into success, and the NUMBER one factor of lack of success is marrying the wrong person. I should be grateful I’ve dodged that bullet multiple times now, and be patient that God will put the right one in my path, and just avoid the kind of pain I’ve seen and felt thus far in my sobriety. Old patterns, old habits, die hard. Some of the most self-centered people on Earth are lurking just behind the most gorgeous skin masks. Actions speak louder than words, and deeds are more important than faces, hair and beautiful eyes.

Just got back another professional review for the book so maybe I’m just in a foul mood haha. He said it was a good story, and positive for the most part, but it needed a proof reader and a content editor. My first reaction was to tell him to go fuck himself, but then I knew both of those things anyway, and planned on finding a good editor to trim down a paper back version regardless of what he said. In fact, instead of being resentful to a professional reviewer, I’m going to take his advice, and begin looking for someone to do just that. I think I’ll still leave the hard copy original up though, for the purposes of seeing the artistic process unfold, it can serve as a stepping stone so to speak. The important thing is to not take it personally… even though I do.

Still, could have been worse I suppose. Hopefully, the interview will go well.

Respectfully,

Jared Bryan Smith