An epic saga about too much epic sagas in my life.
If I wasn’t so tired, I’d be effervescent over having time night back at the old back door desk, with a supervisor who prefers to do all the footwork for the shift. Sorry to have been long in the posts again, but primarily, its been really tiring to adjust to my new schedule, in full site rotation (meaning I work wherever they put me,) so that my job is now as rove-heavy as it was rove-light before the change. I’ve slept more than usual, and I had trouble being anything but lethargic, or least, mildly hedonistic, on my last two weekends. Not that I considered these weekends wasted, or felt (all that much) guilty over it. But I’ve been really resistant to sitting down and writing out what I’ve been mulling over so intently the fortnight, because of the troubling nature of those thoughts, and this is the secondary reasoning. It could be the primary, but I’m so good at being lethargic that I was being too lazy too tell the difference.
Much as I like deconstruction, I loath what happens when I do it to myself, especially when I come across something that makes me decidedly uncomfortable to challenge. My self-work is mostly stripping back the layers of things I do/have done and I say/have said, which are really important indicators of identity I project (as opposed to the one I believe I have,) to expose the source motivators and beliefs that hold my reality-tunnel in place. I can’t say any of the process is pleasant, but some can be downright gruesome, especially with my control issues. When I speak of finding the mountain when I crash right into it, this is a sparkling example. Add in the heavier impact of discoveries when working at these deeper levels of myself. And here I am, facing what I feel is a core definer, something that I’ve discolored my world with for years, going back into the ill-remembered days of childhood, and back even further into one of my most basic fears; that when I have peeled away the projection of me, there is little of the true me underneath. The realization is quite simple, unsurprisingly. Complications are more my own doing. I’ve been dancing around this for the last several years, but all that didn’t solidify until I was “ready” more recently.
So much more of my understanding comes from trigger events that bust open what is underneath them, when I need to know. I’d like to stroke my ego, but in public that’s probably indecent, and I’m not directly the source of all my changes like I always want to believe. Some stuff comes when it comes, usually when I am aiming to blindly do a major repeat of a bad decision. Management transferred some officers from night shift to swing, just recently, and to fill those slots; I’ve been moved into full site rotation, meaning I’m more likely to be doing mall roves, than desk duty. At first I didn’t know about the whole transfer thing when I found out, and I got really mad. I had been told I would be working the back door desk, except for irregular training on other parts of the site. I couldn’t understand why I needed to work anywhere else, and I resented the amount of burnt shoe-leather the roves entailed. Naturally, I started complaining to anyone who would listen, but it was only until I realize I was questioning the decision vocally with a supervisor, that this time, I knew I’d gone too far. I figured I must have been damn obnoxious to listen to, with all that presumptuousness. And that’s when I clicked over. Who in the hell did I think I was demanding how and where I should work, at a service industry job no less? It was that I felt entitled to working as I pleased, as if I knew better, and that meant there was no reason what I wanted shouldn’t be. Here I was, Mr. Independence, and I was still trying to manipulate the system to get what I want, while cursing it out at the same time. When I had sought security, swallowing enough pride, I’d been sure I’d get something less comfortable than the peach post I had. I wanted the desk job, though, and I was already working up some way to get it back, when it dawned on me that I was handling this precisely as I’d handled anything else I didn’t like, and anything I felt to which I thought myself entitled. Where did I get this sense of entitlement? How could I believe something not that hard to do, was too hard for me, and I couldn’t do it? Did I see much of my life in the same way? And when I started to cringe is when I what I believed was probably wrong, and had been wrong much of my life, going all the way back. And when I worked through that, I came up with a believed truth that has turned everything upside-down. Again.
My life ain’t been so tough. There. That’s all there is. Amazing, isn’t it? A simple unassuming statement, that happens to undermine a greater majority of my approach to my life. I’ve actually worked with this bugger on several occasions, but the narrowness of my reality tunnel of the time hadn’t broadened enough for me to really question this truth, as in I only glanced off the mountain. I don’t ever remember a time I didn’t feel like the heavier weight of the troubles of my life was found outside myself, in the very iconic structures of my childhood, from my father to Western Civilization. Being smart made the whole society-is-at-fault a lot easier to justify rationally. In my inner eye, my life has been a veritable hell of persecution and abandonment by all the things and people I was told I could count on to produce a good life. Now I am dueling with this fallacy: Certainly I have a persecution complex, but that’s because, well, I was so savagely persecuted. My life had been a hell born of unending social failures which left me open to the constant attacks by my peers, as if I was being thrown sacrificially with my blood used to oil the great wheels of social conformity. (I know I sound overdramatic in presenting this image of my childhood, but that’s the point. It’s over dramatized.) I am a creature of paradox born of the endless pain of rejection and solitude. It’s all so horrible that I have blocked out nearly all my memories up until I was seventeen. Yadda yadda. I can go on like that for pages. I’ve managed to make something out of my oppression, but like a truly dogmatic zealot, I have never really dared question the truth of that oppression.
Don’t get me wrong here. I did get the really bad end of the social stick. I was badly misunderstood by the various authority figures and institutions, and I did end up alone and angry a lot. My parents are indeed control freaks, as are both side of my family, and they really didn’t have any idea what to make of their unexpected learning-disabled son, but I could still get them to get me anything I wanted, really. I was immature, and blind in my desire for attention. (All my life I’ve been given to histrionics. When I was told to get out from my last job, I screamed and bawled simultaneously. This is the first time I’ve owned that. I acted a lot worse on my last day, than I’ve ever let on, and probably just buried myself deeper.) I really did go through some rough stuff as a kid, but I won’t own up that it wasn’t as rough as I believed. I’ve gained even a measure of comparative suffering only recently. It’s not that hard to do. I listen to what the Woman went through, and I bet she thinks my life sounded like a cakewalk, albeit maybe with a really bad thigh rash. So much of it, I think is “compromise” I made so that I could get along with others, and not accept that their pain is less than my pain.
I’ve walked such a thin line in confronting my past that I’ve just drawn up more detailed rationalities, and accepted them as facts. I’ve always believed that I blocked out so much of my childhood because it was so terrible and humiliating that I could only function if I forgot the whole damn thing and moved on. I feel weird for only now finding the huge flaws in this piece of fine logic. My hyperactivity is present in my life now, but not nearly at the uncontrollable levels of the climb up to the peak at around the young teens, and my hold on that plateau until my senior year of high school (which was also the height of my medication dosages.) If my focus is loose now, and my memory unreliable also, that I forget the names of people I live with, and my street address, then how worse was my storage when I was at the heights. My mother has told me that I used to forget my own name, when I was around ten. My life is still a massive blur at times, where when I am running hot, I can become very disjointed from time and space references in my head. What if I can’t remember my youth because it got washed over and blurred out of my memory? Then also, I’ve done so much work to rebuild myself into a functional person, that I find I can’t quite grasp my frame of mind before the GF. Maybe, it’s like I’ve rendered my neural memory pathways to then semi-obsolete, so that my software can’t really access it. I’d taken the troubles remembering and incorporated them intrinsically that they helped build a false sense of foundation, which formed the very way I see and react to the world around me, and to myself.
Weirder is the idea that I drew up this elaborate psychodrama, like some individual mythology, based on a few nuggets of actual experience, because I didn’t have it so rough. I’m not the child of high privilege, but I never did any chores, or the few I was asked to do I weaseled my way out. With few friends, no extracurricular activities, and low expectations, I spent nearly all my free time in my room, reading and watching TV. (Mostly watching TV.) So I had all the time in the world to dwell on how I was a social misfit, and build a fine fortress from a small house in my head to explain it all away. The pain was real, but I did more damage just sitting around and trying to resolve my suffering. My ability to communicate was just about nil, and was until college. So, even though my parents spent gobs of money on pills, shrinks, and other help, I didn’t even know how to ask for that help. And the help assumed away on who I was and what was wrong, so that I can imagine how frustrated I must have been. And how baffled I was, since I felt entitled to answers that made sense to me, that I felt I could control and master, if I just knew them. And I got angrier and angrier. Ever since the GF, I’ve been afraid of my anger. I don’t like how it feels now, and I still can barely keep it in check, but back then I had no self-control. Resentment festers much quicker in my self-professed” exile, along with the sadness I guess I was trying to escape. That was a bad time, and one I wish I was more thankful I survived. No matter how bad, or more over in matter of how bad I thought my life was, I never crossed the lines, with my right being suicide or drug addiction, and my right being Columbine. Least that I know I am not exaggerating, since I do at least remember how intensely I hated school, and dreamed of exacting my revenge. I’ve never been sure if it was luck or cowardice that kept it from going any further. Hope seems like an invention of conceit, as another invention of that time when I attempted to glory in my unbound heroic struggle against the universe. But I’d like to think otherwise, still.
Man, this is really hard. I’ve worked out a lot of this sporadically, but I’ve never brought together like this. As I write, I’m confirming to myself the distinct possibility that indeed, everything I know is wrong. I’ve spent years trying to give up my self-beatified victimization, when I could never give it up, because so much of it just isn’t real. I can’t even imagine how I will manage to understand what I see or what I think without this personal paradigm. Honestly, I am scared that I’ve invested so much of myself in over-rationalizing my problems, that like my memory, who I am might have been completely forced out in the miasma of one smart spoiled kid trying to figure out why no-one understands him, and passing the responsibility off onto the system and turning the whole thing into this epic battle of one guy against the universe. My life is mostly just a big misunderstanding… with myself. Ugh. What will I do if no-one, even myself, is to blame? How much more of my sense of perception and experience are quasi-illusions needed to keep the fantasy going?
Much as I like deconstruction, I loath what happens when I do it to myself, especially when I come across something that makes me decidedly uncomfortable to challenge. My self-work is mostly stripping back the layers of things I do/have done and I say/have said, which are really important indicators of identity I project (as opposed to the one I believe I have,) to expose the source motivators and beliefs that hold my reality-tunnel in place. I can’t say any of the process is pleasant, but some can be downright gruesome, especially with my control issues. When I speak of finding the mountain when I crash right into it, this is a sparkling example. Add in the heavier impact of discoveries when working at these deeper levels of myself. And here I am, facing what I feel is a core definer, something that I’ve discolored my world with for years, going back into the ill-remembered days of childhood, and back even further into one of my most basic fears; that when I have peeled away the projection of me, there is little of the true me underneath. The realization is quite simple, unsurprisingly. Complications are more my own doing. I’ve been dancing around this for the last several years, but all that didn’t solidify until I was “ready” more recently.
So much more of my understanding comes from trigger events that bust open what is underneath them, when I need to know. I’d like to stroke my ego, but in public that’s probably indecent, and I’m not directly the source of all my changes like I always want to believe. Some stuff comes when it comes, usually when I am aiming to blindly do a major repeat of a bad decision. Management transferred some officers from night shift to swing, just recently, and to fill those slots; I’ve been moved into full site rotation, meaning I’m more likely to be doing mall roves, than desk duty. At first I didn’t know about the whole transfer thing when I found out, and I got really mad. I had been told I would be working the back door desk, except for irregular training on other parts of the site. I couldn’t understand why I needed to work anywhere else, and I resented the amount of burnt shoe-leather the roves entailed. Naturally, I started complaining to anyone who would listen, but it was only until I realize I was questioning the decision vocally with a supervisor, that this time, I knew I’d gone too far. I figured I must have been damn obnoxious to listen to, with all that presumptuousness. And that’s when I clicked over. Who in the hell did I think I was demanding how and where I should work, at a service industry job no less? It was that I felt entitled to working as I pleased, as if I knew better, and that meant there was no reason what I wanted shouldn’t be. Here I was, Mr. Independence, and I was still trying to manipulate the system to get what I want, while cursing it out at the same time. When I had sought security, swallowing enough pride, I’d been sure I’d get something less comfortable than the peach post I had. I wanted the desk job, though, and I was already working up some way to get it back, when it dawned on me that I was handling this precisely as I’d handled anything else I didn’t like, and anything I felt to which I thought myself entitled. Where did I get this sense of entitlement? How could I believe something not that hard to do, was too hard for me, and I couldn’t do it? Did I see much of my life in the same way? And when I started to cringe is when I what I believed was probably wrong, and had been wrong much of my life, going all the way back. And when I worked through that, I came up with a believed truth that has turned everything upside-down. Again.
My life ain’t been so tough. There. That’s all there is. Amazing, isn’t it? A simple unassuming statement, that happens to undermine a greater majority of my approach to my life. I’ve actually worked with this bugger on several occasions, but the narrowness of my reality tunnel of the time hadn’t broadened enough for me to really question this truth, as in I only glanced off the mountain. I don’t ever remember a time I didn’t feel like the heavier weight of the troubles of my life was found outside myself, in the very iconic structures of my childhood, from my father to Western Civilization. Being smart made the whole society-is-at-fault a lot easier to justify rationally. In my inner eye, my life has been a veritable hell of persecution and abandonment by all the things and people I was told I could count on to produce a good life. Now I am dueling with this fallacy: Certainly I have a persecution complex, but that’s because, well, I was so savagely persecuted. My life had been a hell born of unending social failures which left me open to the constant attacks by my peers, as if I was being thrown sacrificially with my blood used to oil the great wheels of social conformity. (I know I sound overdramatic in presenting this image of my childhood, but that’s the point. It’s over dramatized.) I am a creature of paradox born of the endless pain of rejection and solitude. It’s all so horrible that I have blocked out nearly all my memories up until I was seventeen. Yadda yadda. I can go on like that for pages. I’ve managed to make something out of my oppression, but like a truly dogmatic zealot, I have never really dared question the truth of that oppression.
Don’t get me wrong here. I did get the really bad end of the social stick. I was badly misunderstood by the various authority figures and institutions, and I did end up alone and angry a lot. My parents are indeed control freaks, as are both side of my family, and they really didn’t have any idea what to make of their unexpected learning-disabled son, but I could still get them to get me anything I wanted, really. I was immature, and blind in my desire for attention. (All my life I’ve been given to histrionics. When I was told to get out from my last job, I screamed and bawled simultaneously. This is the first time I’ve owned that. I acted a lot worse on my last day, than I’ve ever let on, and probably just buried myself deeper.) I really did go through some rough stuff as a kid, but I won’t own up that it wasn’t as rough as I believed. I’ve gained even a measure of comparative suffering only recently. It’s not that hard to do. I listen to what the Woman went through, and I bet she thinks my life sounded like a cakewalk, albeit maybe with a really bad thigh rash. So much of it, I think is “compromise” I made so that I could get along with others, and not accept that their pain is less than my pain.
I’ve walked such a thin line in confronting my past that I’ve just drawn up more detailed rationalities, and accepted them as facts. I’ve always believed that I blocked out so much of my childhood because it was so terrible and humiliating that I could only function if I forgot the whole damn thing and moved on. I feel weird for only now finding the huge flaws in this piece of fine logic. My hyperactivity is present in my life now, but not nearly at the uncontrollable levels of the climb up to the peak at around the young teens, and my hold on that plateau until my senior year of high school (which was also the height of my medication dosages.) If my focus is loose now, and my memory unreliable also, that I forget the names of people I live with, and my street address, then how worse was my storage when I was at the heights. My mother has told me that I used to forget my own name, when I was around ten. My life is still a massive blur at times, where when I am running hot, I can become very disjointed from time and space references in my head. What if I can’t remember my youth because it got washed over and blurred out of my memory? Then also, I’ve done so much work to rebuild myself into a functional person, that I find I can’t quite grasp my frame of mind before the GF. Maybe, it’s like I’ve rendered my neural memory pathways to then semi-obsolete, so that my software can’t really access it. I’d taken the troubles remembering and incorporated them intrinsically that they helped build a false sense of foundation, which formed the very way I see and react to the world around me, and to myself.
Weirder is the idea that I drew up this elaborate psychodrama, like some individual mythology, based on a few nuggets of actual experience, because I didn’t have it so rough. I’m not the child of high privilege, but I never did any chores, or the few I was asked to do I weaseled my way out. With few friends, no extracurricular activities, and low expectations, I spent nearly all my free time in my room, reading and watching TV. (Mostly watching TV.) So I had all the time in the world to dwell on how I was a social misfit, and build a fine fortress from a small house in my head to explain it all away. The pain was real, but I did more damage just sitting around and trying to resolve my suffering. My ability to communicate was just about nil, and was until college. So, even though my parents spent gobs of money on pills, shrinks, and other help, I didn’t even know how to ask for that help. And the help assumed away on who I was and what was wrong, so that I can imagine how frustrated I must have been. And how baffled I was, since I felt entitled to answers that made sense to me, that I felt I could control and master, if I just knew them. And I got angrier and angrier. Ever since the GF, I’ve been afraid of my anger. I don’t like how it feels now, and I still can barely keep it in check, but back then I had no self-control. Resentment festers much quicker in my self-professed” exile, along with the sadness I guess I was trying to escape. That was a bad time, and one I wish I was more thankful I survived. No matter how bad, or more over in matter of how bad I thought my life was, I never crossed the lines, with my right being suicide or drug addiction, and my right being Columbine. Least that I know I am not exaggerating, since I do at least remember how intensely I hated school, and dreamed of exacting my revenge. I’ve never been sure if it was luck or cowardice that kept it from going any further. Hope seems like an invention of conceit, as another invention of that time when I attempted to glory in my unbound heroic struggle against the universe. But I’d like to think otherwise, still.
Man, this is really hard. I’ve worked out a lot of this sporadically, but I’ve never brought together like this. As I write, I’m confirming to myself the distinct possibility that indeed, everything I know is wrong. I’ve spent years trying to give up my self-beatified victimization, when I could never give it up, because so much of it just isn’t real. I can’t even imagine how I will manage to understand what I see or what I think without this personal paradigm. Honestly, I am scared that I’ve invested so much of myself in over-rationalizing my problems, that like my memory, who I am might have been completely forced out in the miasma of one smart spoiled kid trying to figure out why no-one understands him, and passing the responsibility off onto the system and turning the whole thing into this epic battle of one guy against the universe. My life is mostly just a big misunderstanding… with myself. Ugh. What will I do if no-one, even myself, is to blame? How much more of my sense of perception and experience are quasi-illusions needed to keep the fantasy going?
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