Welcome to my new blog, Untangling the Gord. I am your host, TangledGord, and no that isn’t any semblance of my real name. I discovered long ago that anonymity is generally a good thing when posting about personal stuff on the internet. You can call me Gord for now, but I might be brave enough to share my real first name later.
So what’s with the name? No, I didn’t misspell gourd, which is a common euphemism for one’s head – especially when there is something wrong with it. The name is a reference to the Gordian Knot of Greek mythology, which according to legend was an impossibly tangled knot that only “the chosen one” could untangle. None other than Alexander the Great himself solved the knot either by cutting it with his sword or by pulling the lynch pin around which it was tangled. Basically, he pulled a Captain Kirk a la the Kobyashi Maru dilemma, and rather than solving the unsolvable problem, he literally hacked the scenario.
But enough about the fictional man-whore of the USS Enterprise and the very real military genius of Macedonia.
The Gordian knot is basically a metaphor for an intractable problem. I chose it for this blog after one of my recent sessions with my psychiatric nurse. I was discussing my self-doubt and second-guessing about my mental health and how I didn’t know how many of my problems are real vs. imagined vs. created by my seeming obsession about my mental health.
It felt like, and still feels like, I pull on a thread here, and the knot gets worse over there. If I work on the knot over there, I pull the thread back into the knot in yet another spot. I wish there was a simple “cut the knot” solution (other than suicide, which I’ll get to) but after the better part of a decade in therapy of one form or another, I feel just as tangled as ever.
So that’s what this is all about. Tugging on a thread here. Poking at the knot there. Looking at it from yet another angle. Talking about what I’m seeing and experiencing. Maybe a little discussion about your knots and how your progress is coming along.
If that is something that sounds interesting to you, then please subscribe. I look forward to sitting a while with you and hopefully easing the tension out of this knot in my mind.
Untangling the Gord 