I Regret, I Digress

    I wouldn’t doubt that if Florida had basements, that’s where it would have all begun.
    With this sole reason in tow, I am grateful for living near a coastline for one of the few times in my life. I fear that had we lived deeper within the states, I may have never escaped the basement he constructed around me with calloused hands. I don’t think my newly sprouted wings would have been enough to break.

    If Likens’ wings couldn’t break her free of her prison after having so long to grow with such grotesque nourishment, I know with complete assurance mine never would have. Our comparisons of strength are too extreme in diversity of the American crime.
    She is the high and I am the low because she is publicized and fabricated to fascination. I wasn’t hurt badly enough to be celluloid beyond recognition. Like the death of average caucasian children making C’s and D’s, once recognized by the media she was glorified far past the typical hormonal girl that lacked the suddenly bestowed qualities recommended for sainthood.
    Likens didn’t even survive, but she was not a martyr to her crime. The idea of her is the martyrdom, and with the control I hold I can go the far distance to become an idea for necessary remembrance. Vexed victims minded.

    Remaining unnoticed by the uncaring world surrounding, I revolve. I have remained a target of disgust and disbelief amongst the jeering circus crowd of ridicule and shame despite my revolutionary act. My pain is not exaggerated nor glorified for film or song, my face is not a poster child for survival, and it never will be. I must die several times alive before I become anything memorable, save killing myself completely.

    Knit stitched into my existence, the idea of killing myself has shamelessly reared its ugly head since the day I got my wings, so obviously it might as well have very well sprouted from the back of my head shrieking.
    Before everything completely destroys me to a point of being utterly useless (it’s possible, tis true), I know that now is the time to unravel the suppressive cloth from my head before I bleed out too much.

    Now is the only time left to risk pulling the axe from its Black Lodge wedged into my skull, and hope for a miracle of survival at the end of the hospital hall lined with baker dozens of reconstructive surgeries I will undoubtedly endure for the rest of my physical, personal life.
    Regression is upon us meaning me, my time to thoroughly delve within my history once and for all. This complete exploitation of all I have suffered is my final and only hope of destroying myself over and over again for a remarkable rebirth.

    With idealized suicide in mind, this is how I got my wings.

Monday's Excerpts - A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

     When I read A Wolf at the Table last December, I was beginning to delve heavily into sociology, and what all the study contains. Sociopathy especially had become a high interest of mine after reading The Sociopath Next Door. I believed I had found what has always been wrong with my birth mother, and strands of me still tug towards that hypothesis.
     After reading A Wolf, I couldn’t help but speculate that Burroughs’ father had a likelihood of being a sociopath as well; I related so closely to how he was treated as a child and in his later years. The excerpts I have chosen today remind me most of what I experienced growing up the few years my birth mother resided in my young life.
     Although now exiled from the gift of enjoying my existence, my horrors of her still pang at my sides, ratting about my ribcage begging angrily to be freed of my prison skin. I imagine this is close to how Burroughs felt, by reading his descriptions of self-agony after the fact of his father’s absence. I can only hope alongside my willpower that someday I’ll find the solace I seek, too.

This Week's Book: A Wolf at the Table by Augusten Burroughs

     I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.
     And if I put everything in God’s hands, wasn’t that a copout? If I didn’t get what I wanted I could use God as an excuse, I could say, “He didn’t want me to have it.” When, in fact, maybe I hadn’t worked hard enough on my own.
     If I wanted to be free of my father, it wasn’t up to some man in the sky. It was up to me. (Page 163)

—————

     I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind—an emptiness—a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn’t even need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such a freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it.
     Maybe, I thought, I don’t need a father to be happy. Maybe, what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what’s missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be. (Page 177)

—————

     Another thing was clear to me in this moment: I was not him. I was me. Whatever wrong thing he contained, he had not passed it on. (Page 229)

Books read this past week...
★★★★☆ Lord of the Flies by William Golding
★★★★☆ Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
★★★☆☆ The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester
★★★★★ River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Here is My Real Head series Pt. 5

Organ Grinder by Marilyn Manson

I am the face of piss and shit and sugar

I do a crooked little dance with my funny little monkey
What I want, what I want is just your children
I hate what I have become to escape what I hated being
Calliopenis envy from your daddy
You're not gonna hear what he don't want to hear
What I say disgusts him
He wants to be me and that scares him
"let's do a funny little dance with my funny little monkey"
The black keys
Here is my real head, here is my real head
I wear this fucking mask because you cannot handle me
Here is my real head
They try to blink me not to think me
Don't want to bring me out
I am the rotten teeth, my fists are lined with suckers
My prison skin's an eyesore-mirror-sketch-pad
I am your son, your dad, your fag, I am your fad
Here is my real head, here is my real head
I wear this fucking mask because you cannot handle me
Here is my real head

Here is My Real Head series 

Pt. 1 - Addiction & Self Mutilation
Pt. 2 - Childhood Grooming & Sex and Relationships
Pt. 3 - Worth of My Peers & Trust
Pt. 4 - Being Honest with My Parents
Pt. 5 - The Sound and Feel of Carpet

8. The Sound and Feel of Carpet

    Where I long to swim and the dirt I’m buried in are two entirely different earths.

     What becomes a fish is born free of their counting clock, while what disintegrates into a worm is born already dying to blast off into space.

     And I think that’s a lot like me; I’m a disrupted galaxy. My black holes are my quirks.

-~-

     For as long as I can remember, the sensation of touching carpet with my skin, or the sound of someone else’s, has always enraged me. I want to smash my own father’s face into a thousand imperfect pieces every single time he rubs his feet on the carpet, assumingly forgetting how many times I’ve told him I can’t stand it.

     Around the age of three or four, my mom came over to my house. At the time, I referred to her as my aunt Stephanie, as biologically, she is my birth mother’s sister.

     She came over to tell my birth mother that she wanted to take me to the Florida Aquarium, and I imagine she was basically asking for permission because she was so young. From what I can recall, my birth mother was reluctant, but hiding it so. I assume she was jealous, she slyly tried to convince me it wasn’t a great idea by telling me of the sharks that would be there. Knowing it was my biggest fear—aside from tornadoes, which no one knew of at the time—she had me instantly terrified. At some point during the conversation, I jumped up and ran down the hallway, where I accidently fell to my knees and skidded across the carpet into her bedroom door.

     I was left with painful rug burn at the end of the hallway, crying and terrified. I wanted to go and spend time with my aunt Stephanie at the aquarium, I just wanted to be brave enough to go, as now it was required. I was angry my birth mother ruined it for me by telling me of my horrors awaiting me there. If I went after hearing about the sharks, I was to be forced into a situation I had to be brave in, when I already had so much fear within me begging to rip free from my chest.

     Reflecting back, I think I have a pretty decent guess as to why carpet bothers me so. Though it’s important to mention first, it’s obviously another piece of my negative childhood conditioning by the rage it brews, as opposed to the various other emotions it could arouse instead.

     When I really think about the personal essence of carpet, I realize its symbolism has always meant fear, and more so, being forced into fear by an outside force. It’s an odd, and unusual situation rarely faced in regular life. Now when I fear something, I almost always have a choice to face it or turn away without any true consequences besides my own guilt which is easily dealt with. However, in the aquarium situation, I was being “punished” by not going to the aquarium if I wasn’t brave enough to conquer my fear, unfairly before ever even witnessing it.

     What bothers me most is there was no need for me to know about the sharks prior to entering the aquarium in the first place. My birth mother scared me before I even had a chance to comprehend the fear.

My Priorities

            Everyone’s priorities are different, but often it seems like some people have theirs in a constant scramble, or they’re completely lacking. I’ve never understood people like that outside of a sarcastic comment. I cannot fathom traveling through life without a set plan or set of rules for myself (outside of my instincts). Where would I be? I’d be lost, aimless, I’ve been there before. I reached my lowest of lows when I had nothing to live by or for. I lost all hope to create anything for myself, so I simply didn’t. Destruction wasn’t creation in the form I practiced.

            Today I decided it might be a good idea to publicize my priorities to help others realize the importance of their own. I’ve also come across a frequent issue in regard to how others perceive my priorities. Outside of my obligations to others, for those that feel the urge to quiz me or even ponder my doings when they should be focusing on their own, I do not want anyone to ever be confused as to what’s on my mind as far as my daily and overall plans go. I hope these listings will give the inquisitive a better insight as to why I do what I do, and maybe they will grow to understand the way in which I do them. By opening my mind to every element, I hope to crack the surface of others’. My practice isn’t typical, but I should never be doubted on serious matters, it’s a shame when I am. I never seriously doubt myself.

Daily Priorities

• Waking up early, around 8 AM. What time I go to sleep matters less, I will always wake up at 8 without excuses the next morning. If I’m tired the next day, well, a lesson was provided to be learned from.
• Studying a beneficial subject, physical and social sciences, to my future formal education. Science will always come before philosophy studies. I read chapters or entire predetermined books, then do citations and excerpts in respective files on my laptop.
• Writing. I strive to write something every day if the inspiration strikes me If I don’t write, I’m thinking about writing. Actually, now that I consider it, I’m constantly thinking about writing, the English language, word painting, etc. I also write five things I’m grateful for each day - different than what I’ve written before - if I remember to do so.
• Exercise. Bike riding, group sports if an opportunity presents itself among my friends having similar interests that day, dancing, work out videos, walking my dog(s), etc.
• Eating right. I never eat when bored, a feat in itself considering I’m home alone all day. I only drink water and green tea. I’m happy with my body, but this and the latter are done to better my health and to tone my shape.
• Talking to each of my best friends at least once. Too many times have I been self-consumed by my personal activities, only to lose touch with those that meant the most. (Unfortunately, one I lost for what I imagine will be forever.) It’s not that I don’t care about my friends enough to go out of my way to contact them on a daily basis, I just get so focused on my bigger plans. Sometimes that focus blocks out my daily priorities, but not just this one.
• Share my thoughts of the day with at least one person willing to listen. Whether it be an idea, a concept, or something else to do with future writings, it doesn’t matter. I simply hope that those I share with enjoy listening.
• Spending time with my father for at least an hour a day, if he is available. I try to spend as much time with him as I possibly can. It’s easy to get along with him, we never run out of things to talk about because our likes and dislikes are nearly identical, our thoughts in sync to a scary degree. I cannot even think of any dramatic difference of interest or opinion, I could only measure it by our levels of passion for things we both like.
• Speaking to my mother at least once a day, if she is readily available.

Overall Priorities (In Order of Importance)

• Helping others to the best of my present capabilities. Everything I do and strive for in life is to better my skills in doing so. Constantly improving myself for the greater good makes me happiest above anything else. Family, friends, pets, even writing and learning. Of course, to help I exercise the things I just described, but this gives me an absolute joy, never to be diminished.
• My formal and private education. Formal, for credibility. I still have faith in learning formally by teacher and school. Private, for gaining knowledge on subjects I am personally interested in that may not be formally taught to the length I would prefer to comprehend them.
• Overcoming on a daily, yet lifelong basis, the sexual and physical abuse I endured as a child. I place this second on my overall priorities because I feel that if it were my number one priority, it would consume me.
• Writing memoirs. This ties into my third overall priority to a lengthy degree. Writing every story I know, from every horror I personally faced and witnessed as an outsider, every joy I felt and the ones I later resented… these will be actions that set me free, this victim crime will liberate me no matter the expensive cost.

Monday's Excerpts - Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

     I've been thinking about Lolita a lot lately because of how often I've been listening to 'Eat Me, Drink Me' when I'm in the car ("This is only a game, this is only a game"). I'm not sure why, but I love driving to the title track, and 'Wrapped in Plastic'. The first excerpt is pretty relative too.
     I feel like I've posted about every typically read book, I need to find something different next week if I can finish the three books I'm currently working on. This series is going to be extremely boring if they're all excerpts from books everyone has already read.

(This is not the edition I read.)

This Week's Book: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

     And presently I was driving through the drizzle of the dying day, with the windshield wipers in full action but unable to cope with my tears. (Page 256)

—————

     I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art. To quote an old poet:

The moral sense in mortals is the duty

We have to pay on mortal sense of beauty.
(Page 258)

—————

     Every serious writer, I dare say, is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence. Its pilot light is steadily burning somewhere in the basement and a mere touch applied to one’s private thermostat instantly results in a quiet little explosion of familiar warmth. This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain points, byroads, favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys more tenderly than the rest of one’s book. . . . ('Nabokov on a book entitled LOLITA.' Page 287)

Books read this past week...
Currently working on The Origin of Species, The Book of Animal Ignorance, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

(All title links link back to my webpages of them on Goodreads.com, a great library/reviewing/rating website for readers. Check it out, and add me as a friend if you decide to join!)

Here is My Real Head series Pt. 2

Organ Grinder by Marilyn Manson
I am the face of piss and shit and sugar

I do a crooked little dance with my funny little monkey
What I want, what I want is just your children
I hate what I have become to escape what I hated being
Calliopenis envy from your daddy
You're not gonna hear what he don't want to hear
What I say disgusts him
He wants to be me and that scares him
"let's do a funny little dance with my funny little monkey"
The black keys
Here is my real head, here is my real head
I wear this fucking mask because you cannot handle me
Here is my real head
They try to blink me not to think me
Don't want to bring me out
I am the rotten teeth, my fists are lined with suckers
My prison skin's an eyesore-mirror-sketch-pad
I am your son, your dad, your fag, I am your fad
Here is my real head, here is my real head
I wear this fucking mask because you cannot handle me
Here is my real head

Here is My Real Head series 

Pt. 1 - Addiction & Self Mutilation 

Pt. 2 - Childhood Grooming & Sex and Relationships 

Pt. 3 - Worth of My Peers & Trust

Pt. 4 - Being Honest with My Parents
Pt. 5 - The Sound and Feel of Carpet

 

3. Childhood Grooming

     I believe in childhood grooming, because it’s a reality. I do blame the impressionable family members present during my childhood for a lot of the false ideas cluttering my head that I cannot cease to always reel back in, no matter how far I’ve cast them out into sea. Unfortunately, some people’s installation of ideas differs little in that of a pedophile’s grooming of a desired future victim. There were some people that existed in my childhood that had a purposeful reason for convincing me of the things I still believe, or their negative actions towards me. These people are factually to blame, and they don’t just exist in my childhood, but in yours too.

     Blame doesn’t necessarily have to be negative all the time. You could blame your mother for raising you to be particularly kind to the elderly, but you could also blame your mother for raising you to believe you’re more worthless than the gum on the bottom of her shoe.

     I am not afraid to cast blame where blame is rightfully due. One thing that bothers me above most is when someone is to blame for something, but are allowed to carry on believing they aren’t. Blissfully ignorant to their harm, even worse if they vocalize their believed righteousness.

4. Sex and Relationships

     I don’t remember the night I lost my virginity, not even a fragment of the event. I wasn’t drunk or high, it’s likely I don’t remember because it was held with little importance, or possibly because my brain is cold-wired to throw out anything sexual because of its experiences with sexual events in the past that were obviously negative.

     Being unable to view sex as a normal human being is mainly the fault of every person that molested me and my biological mother, were she not sociopathically void of conscience, who didn’t stop them after she became aware of their doings. I am guilt-ridden whenever the topic of sex comes up without plausible reason. Sex is viewed so negatively in my mind that it tries to completely flush it away every time it’s made re-aware that sex still exists in the physical world I reside in.

     I think the reason I’ve ever been in love is because I was never presented with a positive example of what a relationship should be like, and still have not been to this day. I’ve never been in a relationship with someone I could fall in love with because I seek out difficulties and mutual abuse subconsciously. I don’t want to be in a relationship now and foresee no future desire to be in one because of these recent realizations. All the aspects of a relationship are positively worthless to me, dating, marriage, sex, sole companionship, children with a partner (as opposed to single adoption), etc.

     Upon first perception, my concepts of a relationship are extremely negative compared to societies norm. Physical/sexual abuse between partners or towards the children, destroying property with fists (‘Use Your Fist and Not Your Mouth’, Marilyn Manson),  secret hatred or disgust of your partner, dishonesty and lying, cheating with and without consent, frequent screaming matches, lack of desire to resolve resentment, remaining with your partner only for financial benefits or another sort of personal gain, plus the various types of other torture all come to mind at first thought. I have to otherwise convince myself to believe for a second that other behaviors exist in relationships outside of fairytales, least long enough for them to come out of my mouth as my false perception of normal to please my listener.

     My perceptions of a normal relationship lead me to seek out the very things I listed and more. By not consenting to a relationship, I am protecting myself from what I don’t particularly want, although sickeningly, a part of me does find the aforementioned appealing. Nonetheless, I view them as relatively acceptable, meaning I am not often shocked by the darkness of relationships. Growing up in the society of the Western World has shown me that the types of relationship aspects that first come to my mind aren’t acceptable by the society I’m a part of, the one most influential to the world therefore subconsciously deemed as correct, but I remain well groomed.

Here is My Real Head series Pt. 1

Organ Grinder by Marilyn Manson

I am the face of piss and shit and sugar

I do a crooked little dance with my funny little monkey
What I want, what I want is just your children
I hate what I have become to escape what I hated being
Calliopenis envy from your daddy
You're not gonna hear what he don't want to hear
What I say disgusts him
He wants to be me and that scares him
"let's do a funny little dance with my funny little monkey"
The black keys
Here is my real head, here is my real head
I wear this fucking mask because you cannot handle me
Here is my real head
They try to blink me not to think me
Don't want to bring me out
I am the rotten teeth, my fists are lined with suckers
My prison skin's an eyesore-mirror-sketch-pad
I am your son, your dad, your fag, I am your fad
Here is my real head, here is my real head
I wear this fucking mask because you cannot handle me
Here is my real head

Here is My Real Head series 
Pt. 1 - Addiction & Self Mutilation
Pt. 2 - Childhood Grooming & Sex and Relationships
Pt. 3 - Worth of My Peers & Trust

Pt. 4 - Being Honest with My Parents
Pt. 5 - The Sound and Feel of Carpet

 

     One of the things I’ve deemed most important for me to do is to face things I’m afraid of. It strongly ties in with the quote I assigned the year 2010, ‘Find what you are afraid of, face it, and then you won’t be afraid of it anymore.’ [Marilyn Manson, 1998]  Not that I never did before 2010, but now more than ever I’ve recognized its importance, particularly its importance in my life.
     I’m afraid of a few physical things. Sharks, tornadoes, and getting water in my eyes, to name a few. However, the majority of my fears have always upheld residency in the psychological or sociological realm. I am so well groomed still to this very day that I am frequently terrified of speaking what’s really on my mind. If not terrified, the fear persists on an unnatural scale of appropriateness.
     As a child, I used to secretly draw pictures of my dad with another family because I wasn’t brave enough to tell him that his actions led me to believe that he wanted to leave me and our ‘family’ (loosely used). Years later when he found one of the scrawlings, horrifyingly in my presence, I was deeply ashamed.

     Whenever I reflect back to those instances or ones similar, I shake my head at my childhood self. I wish I could lend her a helping hand, or some useful advice. I wish I could tell her to not fear being as brave as she really wanted to be, no matter what anyone tried to convince her with otherwise. I wish I could tell her how to escape the inevitable outside party conditioning after her own shampooing, but I don’t even have a substantial solution. I wish I could have saved myself for the child’s sake, for me then and for me now, but the lyric ‘there’s no one here to save ourselves’ [‘Man That You Fear’, Marilyn Manson] has never rung truer in my ears.

     Today I decided I wanted to list some things that are my completely honest opinions about the topic discussed. I am showing you my ‘real head’ without any reservations watering my beliefs. Fear-ladden, some. But today I am bravery stricken and bravery is self-contagious.

(This got to be nearly 2,700 words and seven pages long in Microsoft Word, so I am going to split it up into parts that have relative topics. I’ll post them in daily succession. Thank you for reading!)

1. Addiction

     I consider the title ‘addict’ the middle stepping stone of anything relating to the sorts of drugs, alcohol, cutting, sex, etc. The first stone is active participation, the second stone is claiming addiction as a state of being and existing, and the third stone is realizing you don’t necessarily have to be stuck in that mindset forever. It’s realizing NA, AA, SMA, etc. is all a form of brainwashing watered down by society into acceptability. Were these groups advocating something of a different topic, it would be a church or a cult which are equally despicable by various parties, and equally despicable by me personally.
     Not everyone can be strong enough to hop to the third stone, I am at terms with that and hold no resentment towards people that haven’t taken that leap, even if I feel they’re capable of landing safely. By no means, however, do I consider it a leap of faith. It is a reality to me, unless otherwise proved by something scientific.
     Your body is not eternally addicted to physically addictive drugs as far as I know, and you can change your mind to dispel whatever mental addiction subsides, at the least enough so that you won’t partake again. It’s a conscious choice we must make if we want to live happily without constantly being reminded of our faults and past, and I know with me personally it made me feel worse than better. Last time I checked, in any other form that’s considered dwelling, and frowned upon by the populations of major societies when it comes to any other subject like past relationships, or a poor childhood. No one wants to hear you whine or offer up the same excuses for everything, so why is it okay here? Well in my opinion it shouldn’t be, but because it keeps a majority of past ‘abusers’ under control, it’s a popular remedy.
     It’s important to remember that with the help of NA, AA, SMA, etc., you’re ultimately making the decision on whether or not to repeat your actions. The group may be offering something to your table of guilt, but are they really offering up respectable plates of reason? It’s important to come to terms with why you’re not still repeating your past behaviors. Do you genuinely not want to, or are you not because someone else is telling you to? Although the brainwashing can work, it doesn’t work forever, and it’s hardly different than the church convincing you their spiritual scriptures are what create your morals. Your genetics have and always will write your morality, as your mind will always inscribe what behaviors you do and do not participate in.

2. Self Mutilation 
     I don’t consider self mutilation in the form of cutting necessarily an addiction. I recognize that endorphins are released in the brain as a feeling of release when the act is carried through, and perhaps that does add a physical addictive attribute to the act. In my opinion, it doesn’t have as strong of a backing as drugs or alcohol. I believe that it’s favored by many, therefore allowing it the popular label of ‘addiction’ by society.

     I have experienced many mindsets when self mutilating, the most popular being dissociation without memory of the act, spur of the moment anger, rage, or sadness, and as a show of control over my physical behavior. I have upheld the last one listed within the past two weeks a single time, and I do not regret it. I wasn’t sad, and I am not sad now over the fact of my behavior. I am proud actually, proud of my control that it began and ended when and where it did, among other things.
     I don’t consider myself an addict any longer. I finally realize that I am above something that doesn’t even exist. Being an idea isn’t existence, otherwise all church or cult sermons—who can tell the difference anymore—would be true. I got caught up in believing something that wasn’t true, not all too uncommon of human beings, ha.

Writhing at War

            There are some days where I have this idea in my head that the day is meant for my suffering. I am not sure exactly what causes or triggers this, but I cannot deny its relentless force within me, begging me to bring myself pain, screaming for self torture. It sounds very sadistic, maybe even masochistic, but I assure you it’s not.

            I feel guilty. I feel ashamed I said how I really felt when I wrote an email last night. I feel like I should regret it now, but a large part of me is internally yelling, telling me to not ever regret being honest with how I feel about a situation or person’s actions. The core of my personality is battling with the sickness that has devoured it.

I am nearly positive it has always been my childhood conditioning that has silenced me, and now it washes waves of guilt and shame over me whenever the truth peeks out of my lips.

The mental war that wages within me is fighting itself, and has been for a long time. The oppression of truth is wearing thin, and my self is not sure what to do. What tactic to throw next, because they want to win, but sub-consciously within my sub-conscious they know I’m only fighting myself.

            It never should have been this hard for me to be honest with someone or something, perhaps if I could have been sooner it wouldn’t have flowed out of me like a sea of red anger last night. Now it is extreme, and I’m going to pay for something I didn’t even do past this present.

I cannot be fairly charged with acting a certain way because of whatever conditioning I am coated with, nor can I be fairly charged with behaving a way not desired. The latter should be praised if anything. I am trying, so desperately trying to become something I’m outside forcibly not. One day when I figure out how to make the decision of simply becoming what I must be, then I will see, be, the change I wish to see in the world. And the world is me.

"You survived it when it happened, 

you'll survive when you remember it."

The tiniest love

(Written a few days ago, finished up today.)

            On the few occasions I spent time with my birth mother and my brother Kirk, she would constantly obsess over his food consumption. Had he eaten enough, had he eaten too little, had he eaten too fast?

I was used to her creating the illusion of caring about my brother more than me in all aspects, so this was just another usual thing.

However, somewhere along the way something changed and she decided that since she wasn't around to take care of her son and I was around, I would be in charge of making sure he doesn't choke to death on a chicken nugget. "Make sure you watch your brother, don't let him eat too fast."

            She never once told me to watch my brother to make sure he doesn't get into trouble, grows up into a good person, respects his elders, respects his belongings; she wasn't interested in instilling values—although everything was through me—that she didn't have.

You would think though, someone lacking important aspects of being a respectful human being that’s productive to society would want their child to grow up better than they did. There is a chance an adult without poor upbringing would recognize its importance, but considering she's sociopathic—at least by my analysis—it has never crossed her mind and never will because her conscience does not even exist.

            Today I had just walked out of therapy, and I was getting into my mom's car. I was on the phone with my dad, and we were talking about my session, my previous night, and we got on the subject of what I had eaten because my medication annihilates my appetite and it is common for me to forget to eat because I won't be hungry, plus I had just mentioned that I couldn't sleep at all last night. I said that I had eaten yesterday once, I had nachos at the movies. I hadn't eaten since then, so I would eat something today relatively soon even though I was not hungry (he suggested I eat so my energy from lack of sleep doesn't run low).

            As I reassured him, my mom chimed in and said, "Oh you will be eating soon."

            She said it in a way that she says a lot of things—matter-of-fact. When it comes to my mom and rules around respect for others, property, items, and self, there's pretty much a zilch chance of wavering it.

            I guess what I’m trying to say is how grateful I am for something so profound to me. A lot of people I come across are extremely selfish and disrespectful towards their parents over the most trivial things without any reason behind their actions other than “just because”.

I came to the conclusion that because during the crucial years of childhood development, I was not raised within a loving environment or home, and truthfully my childhood was the complete opposite. Any form of love expressed now is entirely unexpected, and means so much more than it would had I grown up normally.

So while my friends may be complaining their parents harp on them when they’re out late at night, I’m thankful every time my dad calls me to ask me where I am and who I’m with.

Today when both of my parents cared about what I had eaten and when I had eaten last even though I’m seventeen. . . it really hit home because it was something specific that I had never gotten when I should have, when it mattered most.