crazyskillsbloginitiative

Once I got a little older, I started to realize that people would think of me strangely if I let them in on who I really was and what my motivations really were.  The obvious solution to this one of many of life’s problems?  Lie.  I got good at it.  I had a lot to keep track of, because I lied to a lot of people.  Just as long as I could keep my story straight though, I’d get away with it and hell - if I got caught, I deserved it anyway.  This is where things started to get interesting for me.  The people I spent time with were also liars and it didn’t matter.  We all knew we were the imaginations of ourselves and, well, when you can define yourself simply by talking (lying) rather than actually doing anything, life didn’t seem so mundane anymore.  During this phase, I reached out to people more and had more “friends” than I had previously in my life.

It wasn’t until after substance abuse counselling that I really got into it, but yeah - that was all part of this phase.  That was one of my many escapes.  And there were times I stayed in escape mode - days on end.  Here, I achieved a sense of balance in my own twisted mind.  I was hurting primarially myself and many of my friends were in the same boat.  I thought I was the mastermind of my life at this point.  But I was a pawn in someone else’s perverted game.  There were moments during this phase when I believed I had achieved clarity, but most of the time was spent clouding my view of the world I was still so desperately afraid of,  living in my own little drug-addled bubble.  On the surface, I was enjoying life to the fullest.  Inside, I was killing myself a little more each day (not to mention the possibility of it all ending abruptly any time now), and pushing the people I knew further from me.  And this was noble, because after all, I deserved it.  With every action of every day I deserved it more.  The sickest part of all of this is that it was all about me.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that people need people.  I had 100 acquaintances.  But I had pushed myself so far from my few true friends.  And soon those friendships began to crumble as well.  I hate to say it - i hate to confront myself like this, but I was too far gone, too far self-immersed to be able to know people, let alone love anyone.  I don’t blame the majority of people I knew during this part of my life for not having kept in touch with me.  It’s ok.  I didn’t know you either.

It’s really pretty difficult to pin down exactly what my problem was as a kid.  I have really blocked out a lot of my childhood.  I just couldn’t wait to get older - I think I knew something wasn’t quite right with what I now know as my chemical composition.  But I did some bad things..  I was bad to people.  I said hurtful things because I wanted other people to be hurt too.  I was terrified.  I mean really genuinely afraid of my family, my friends, my imagination…  There have been a few people in my life who could really work magic and make everything seem ok, though back in the day, that was short-lived.  I was selfish.  (Not to imply that I’m not now..)  I used to do things.. I used to create situations which were hurtful to people - hurtful to myself and it didn’t matter who all got caught in my own personal crossfire.  I would do these things, hurt myself emotionally and physically, because I believed I deserved it.  I was focusedly hurtful to the people who mattered most to me.  I don’t claim to understand why; I certainly cannot justify it.  I just felt as though I deserved it.  I wanted to feel.  After a point, it didn’t matter what.  I just wanted to feel.  I felt a profound emptiness like someone had erased part of who i was.  So I did what many people do.  I tried to fill it.  In all sorts of ways, incriminating notwithstanding.  I even gave up a few times.  Found religion more than once.  And a whole laundry list of other vices.

I would distance myself from my friends when I needed them.  Tell my family to **** *** when they would try to be there for me…  Persued selfish desires above all else and then beat myself up after getting what I thought I wanted because it didn’t fill the void.  Then all I was left with were the memories of hurting the people I cared about.  It was a downward spiral with no end in sight.  And you.  I hurt you.

So what was I so afraid of?  Being alone I think.  Maybe there were other things too, but I think a large part of it all was the fear of being alone.  And I manifested my fear’s coming to fruition by pushing people away in a masochistic self-fulfilling prophecy.  Because I deserved it.