the low point. the low valley. the discarded self.
is weird. I thought I was going to be way past this at this age, you know... the age. Past 40. I thought I was going to be all like, "adult" and "grown up" and "smooth man person who has a hot chick and has lots of monkey fun, and a home and family and bla bla bla" and there's none of that here. like... it's weird that I so am living, in actual reality, such a fringe stereotype of loser deadbeat, like something so unreal, so fake, so contrived that you only see in bad quality movies or TV shows with no values, of the grown old beardy manchild with no job and no future. No savings, no real retirement, no plan, no vision, no hunger, no drive, no ambition or pride at all, just wants to stay at home all day. No will, no fire, no nothing, and yet, here I am. I really have achieved this incredible nothing blandness.
*takes a moment to think, feels that written out of him and onto here*
*breathes* I feel shame. Not at the above, shame and nudging guilt that I wilfully, intentionally aim myself low so that I intensify my shame. So that I hurt more. So that I revel in the only thing I can make in abundance, failure and loss. I am really good at doing a few things, failing and hurting myself. They're easy to accomplish. But now I've been at them so long, I genuinely cannot remember or detect how to create success.
You know, that makes me remember. I will never ever forget how at age 4 or 6 how I began to hurt myself. It is possibly older than my sentience. There was one old song that I heard that.... it was supernatural in how it made me feel sad instantly, sad like sappy cryface sad, like a parody of sad crying. That was what started me on my addiction to emotion, and intense sadness. The other less memorable thing was possibly something related to my father. I was not sentient yet, and barely four, or younger. I was angry at my father, but in the way an animal might be angry. There were no words or thoughts in my head, only the anger and fear sparked by betrayal of this huge hulking thing (I didn't understand this moving thing was my father) who did something to me.... that I can't remember. The sensation of anger and betrayal was so raw, so primal, and so uncontained by human intelligence or actual sentient thought, I was like a small ape that knew I was hurt, but there was no "I want to hurt back" or "I think and this is my father that hurt me." All there was was this emotion. And I decided to rebel. I reached for the shiny heavy (metal) thing that the big thing sometimes used. I was going to use it like he did. I reached for the stapler, and in curiosity, I stapled my thumbnail.
I screamed and cried, predictably. I don't remember what else happened, but I had tears in my eyes and I didn't understand why the heavy thing hurt me. I think I remember seeing the staple in my thumbnail. I have a memory of something messed up in the layers of my skin or nail. And I was so angry, and so hurt. I was too angry to admit that I hurt myself. That in my ignorance I put my hand in a place I shouldn't, I took something I shouldn't, I used something I shouldn't. It was my fault.
*sighs* I realize in admitting this a lifetime later, maybe this is why i grew up trying to explain my way out of everything instead of just saying i made an error. I tend to do that with my mom. anyway.
Since then, I always hurt myself. When I was also four or five maybe, I think my mom took me to see The Land Before Time. That movie scarred me. And it's not that me or my mom or Don Bluth or the other animators are to blame, it's an excellent movie, it just presented very difficult things that I should not have seen at that age, too soon.
The Land Before Time has death, and the act of dying in it. It also has delusion, and self-deception (maybe delusion I guess.) Littlefoot's mom dies. In a loud, dark scene, Littlefoot's mother... dies in front of him. And I can still remember his voice, calling specifically, "Mother? Mother! Mother! :D.... Mother? .... Mother?! ....Mother... :( " and in that moment, the idea manifested in my mind, that my mother was going to die and very soon, and that I was going to cry, helpless, abandoned, alone like Littlefoot.
*has a tear* God, how I wish I would have waited a few years to see that, maybe till age 10 or 12... or 15... to see that. I probably enjoyed the rest fo the film and maybe forgot about the death. In the rest of the film, Littlefoot is raised by his grandparents, so he is not alone, but at age four and five... grandparents are never as much a security blanket as parents are, and every kid knows, mommy is way softer and safer feeling than the father. But that sense of my mother's death, and then my death, and then everyone's death around me, started to occupy my mind. And worry me.
The stapler, and Littlefoot's mom dying, and the sad song that isn't sad at all. I know the song's name and even some lyrics, and it's kinda well known, I just don''t want to name it or look it up... but if anyone wants to know i'll say it. i wish i could break that song's power over me. Maybe naming it would.
Anyway since then, I remember at age six or seven that I went to a... some kind of therapist or psychologist. Remember in the 1980s, psychotherapy and therapy and medicine in general was in the stone ages. So was social understanding of mental health--in fact mental health was a taboo subject that was only relevant to 'crazies' and people who did drugs and 'were bad' and 'messed up their lives.' I had a lot of stereotypes already in me from such a young age, more on how that happened after. I do remember at one of these sessions with some scary grown up person (therapist), they asked me to draw what's in my head, or something like that. I took my time drawing a broken brick wall, and this is where my stupid child cringe comes in. I haaate hate this, and yet love it, I'm addicted to expressing and living my failure. The broken brick wall symbolized me and my defenses, how I put up walls to protect myself and retaliate against people in general, and I also drew these circular robot drone things that would try to repair the wall, but there were only a few and they were unable to completely repair it. Thus the wall was breaking and unfixable, my eternal theme, and it was a sorry scene. I loved expressing my anger and my frustration like that as a very small kid, although now i hate it because my thoughts and anger and feelings are much more complex.
I still like to be the angry enigmatic little man kid though. I don't want to like that anymore.
I had to sleep and now writing the next day, jeez... what else, where else can I go. I think I started to feel my own self at age 7 or 9, and I didn't really have a sense of "I" or individuality/being till age 12 or so. At 13 I decided I was a ..."person." That isn't me being sorry for myself, I just managed to decide myself the notion then. Things got better since then. but back to age 7 or so.... my father left us when I was 8. He was already barely in my life at 6 and a half. I remember fun times with him, but also times I was screaming crying when my mom dropped me off with him. We always went out to take out pizza at Pizza Hut, the location where we went is still there, although it's now some kind of vegan restaurant... I remember, he showed me how to make paper planes torn in a very specific fashion. He showed me a painting he was doing in his place. I openly told him I didn't believe he painted, but I didn't say it was because I couldn't believe he was a painter. I couldn't believe him because at such a young ignorant age, there is no way to believe that someone does something unexpected, especially if you've never seen them EVER have any evidence of doing so ever ever at any time in their life. I never saw a single brush, or a tube of paint, or canvas or even sketch of anything. Maybe my dad was lying, I can't know. What my mom did say is that he did and said many things to fool or lead me into believing things that aren't true, or happened differently. Some were outright lies, but some were those things you tell a kid to ease their worry or phobias, or night terrors, the stuff that isn't true and isn't really important if it's a lie, just stuff to comfort and nudge away a child's train of thought from an unneccessary phobia or trauma.
I remember still, the day my dad just wasn't there, at the drop point. I remember that too. A super prettier McDonald's is now where that point was. There used to be a huge rusting brown metal roof with cold white fluorescent lights, where my mom and dad met and passed me. (It's okay, they're supposed to, it was... arranged) but I recall how dirty and yuck it looked, even in the 80s. And it stayed rotten and up there till the mid 90s maybe. Then they tore it down THANKFULLY, and remodeled the parking lot. Then they updated that again sometime in the 2010s, and now there's a groomed clean off-white painted sharp looking little McDonald's that nobody knows what it used to look like back when I learned and cried there. Back in the 80s one time my dad brought me and we were waiting for my mom and there was a Jeep with one tire clearly cut open, right at the tread, split clean. That was one of my first "broken window theory" kinda notions that there was violence in the world, and mean people, and danger. It left a mark on me, I don't know why.
....Now this is days later and I forgot what else I was goign to post but this is good, I am getting the darkness out of me and maybe rereading it later I can feel it's hundreds of millions of kilometers away. thank you.
*takes a moment to think, feels that written out of him and onto here*
*breathes* I feel shame. Not at the above, shame and nudging guilt that I wilfully, intentionally aim myself low so that I intensify my shame. So that I hurt more. So that I revel in the only thing I can make in abundance, failure and loss. I am really good at doing a few things, failing and hurting myself. They're easy to accomplish. But now I've been at them so long, I genuinely cannot remember or detect how to create success.
You know, that makes me remember. I will never ever forget how at age 4 or 6 how I began to hurt myself. It is possibly older than my sentience. There was one old song that I heard that.... it was supernatural in how it made me feel sad instantly, sad like sappy cryface sad, like a parody of sad crying. That was what started me on my addiction to emotion, and intense sadness. The other less memorable thing was possibly something related to my father. I was not sentient yet, and barely four, or younger. I was angry at my father, but in the way an animal might be angry. There were no words or thoughts in my head, only the anger and fear sparked by betrayal of this huge hulking thing (I didn't understand this moving thing was my father) who did something to me.... that I can't remember. The sensation of anger and betrayal was so raw, so primal, and so uncontained by human intelligence or actual sentient thought, I was like a small ape that knew I was hurt, but there was no "I want to hurt back" or "I think and this is my father that hurt me." All there was was this emotion. And I decided to rebel. I reached for the shiny heavy (metal) thing that the big thing sometimes used. I was going to use it like he did. I reached for the stapler, and in curiosity, I stapled my thumbnail.
I screamed and cried, predictably. I don't remember what else happened, but I had tears in my eyes and I didn't understand why the heavy thing hurt me. I think I remember seeing the staple in my thumbnail. I have a memory of something messed up in the layers of my skin or nail. And I was so angry, and so hurt. I was too angry to admit that I hurt myself. That in my ignorance I put my hand in a place I shouldn't, I took something I shouldn't, I used something I shouldn't. It was my fault.
*sighs* I realize in admitting this a lifetime later, maybe this is why i grew up trying to explain my way out of everything instead of just saying i made an error. I tend to do that with my mom. anyway.
Since then, I always hurt myself. When I was also four or five maybe, I think my mom took me to see The Land Before Time. That movie scarred me. And it's not that me or my mom or Don Bluth or the other animators are to blame, it's an excellent movie, it just presented very difficult things that I should not have seen at that age, too soon.
The Land Before Time has death, and the act of dying in it. It also has delusion, and self-deception (maybe delusion I guess.) Littlefoot's mom dies. In a loud, dark scene, Littlefoot's mother... dies in front of him. And I can still remember his voice, calling specifically, "Mother? Mother! Mother! :D.... Mother? .... Mother?! ....Mother... :( " and in that moment, the idea manifested in my mind, that my mother was going to die and very soon, and that I was going to cry, helpless, abandoned, alone like Littlefoot.
*has a tear* God, how I wish I would have waited a few years to see that, maybe till age 10 or 12... or 15... to see that. I probably enjoyed the rest fo the film and maybe forgot about the death. In the rest of the film, Littlefoot is raised by his grandparents, so he is not alone, but at age four and five... grandparents are never as much a security blanket as parents are, and every kid knows, mommy is way softer and safer feeling than the father. But that sense of my mother's death, and then my death, and then everyone's death around me, started to occupy my mind. And worry me.
The stapler, and Littlefoot's mom dying, and the sad song that isn't sad at all. I know the song's name and even some lyrics, and it's kinda well known, I just don''t want to name it or look it up... but if anyone wants to know i'll say it. i wish i could break that song's power over me. Maybe naming it would.
Anyway since then, I remember at age six or seven that I went to a... some kind of therapist or psychologist. Remember in the 1980s, psychotherapy and therapy and medicine in general was in the stone ages. So was social understanding of mental health--in fact mental health was a taboo subject that was only relevant to 'crazies' and people who did drugs and 'were bad' and 'messed up their lives.' I had a lot of stereotypes already in me from such a young age, more on how that happened after. I do remember at one of these sessions with some scary grown up person (therapist), they asked me to draw what's in my head, or something like that. I took my time drawing a broken brick wall, and this is where my stupid child cringe comes in. I haaate hate this, and yet love it, I'm addicted to expressing and living my failure. The broken brick wall symbolized me and my defenses, how I put up walls to protect myself and retaliate against people in general, and I also drew these circular robot drone things that would try to repair the wall, but there were only a few and they were unable to completely repair it. Thus the wall was breaking and unfixable, my eternal theme, and it was a sorry scene. I loved expressing my anger and my frustration like that as a very small kid, although now i hate it because my thoughts and anger and feelings are much more complex.
I still like to be the angry enigmatic little man kid though. I don't want to like that anymore.
I had to sleep and now writing the next day, jeez... what else, where else can I go. I think I started to feel my own self at age 7 or 9, and I didn't really have a sense of "I" or individuality/being till age 12 or so. At 13 I decided I was a ..."person." That isn't me being sorry for myself, I just managed to decide myself the notion then. Things got better since then. but back to age 7 or so.... my father left us when I was 8. He was already barely in my life at 6 and a half. I remember fun times with him, but also times I was screaming crying when my mom dropped me off with him. We always went out to take out pizza at Pizza Hut, the location where we went is still there, although it's now some kind of vegan restaurant... I remember, he showed me how to make paper planes torn in a very specific fashion. He showed me a painting he was doing in his place. I openly told him I didn't believe he painted, but I didn't say it was because I couldn't believe he was a painter. I couldn't believe him because at such a young ignorant age, there is no way to believe that someone does something unexpected, especially if you've never seen them EVER have any evidence of doing so ever ever at any time in their life. I never saw a single brush, or a tube of paint, or canvas or even sketch of anything. Maybe my dad was lying, I can't know. What my mom did say is that he did and said many things to fool or lead me into believing things that aren't true, or happened differently. Some were outright lies, but some were those things you tell a kid to ease their worry or phobias, or night terrors, the stuff that isn't true and isn't really important if it's a lie, just stuff to comfort and nudge away a child's train of thought from an unneccessary phobia or trauma.
I remember still, the day my dad just wasn't there, at the drop point. I remember that too. A super prettier McDonald's is now where that point was. There used to be a huge rusting brown metal roof with cold white fluorescent lights, where my mom and dad met and passed me. (It's okay, they're supposed to, it was... arranged) but I recall how dirty and yuck it looked, even in the 80s. And it stayed rotten and up there till the mid 90s maybe. Then they tore it down THANKFULLY, and remodeled the parking lot. Then they updated that again sometime in the 2010s, and now there's a groomed clean off-white painted sharp looking little McDonald's that nobody knows what it used to look like back when I learned and cried there. Back in the 80s one time my dad brought me and we were waiting for my mom and there was a Jeep with one tire clearly cut open, right at the tread, split clean. That was one of my first "broken window theory" kinda notions that there was violence in the world, and mean people, and danger. It left a mark on me, I don't know why.
....Now this is days later and I forgot what else I was goign to post but this is good, I am getting the darkness out of me and maybe rereading it later I can feel it's hundreds of millions of kilometers away. thank you.