September 28th, 2009 Ni #2
Are you competitive?
I am excessively competitive. Its something my father drove in my as a child when I saw him, to get ahead. I couldn’t just be good I had to be the best. And it sort of seems like in some things at least it was me trying to get him to be proud of me, even after so many years I think I have an internal check mark, is this good enough for dads approval? Its much harder to turn that off than I thought because I haven’t been able to, but I like being competitive, I like being able to be better than other people are certain things, it draws attention to me in a positive way, I am not a sore winner though I am always gracious, but my competitiveness really comes out after I lose, I go obsessive compulsive on improving to beat the person to beat me. I dunno its weird.
Popularity: 11% [?]
September 28th, 2009 Ni # 1
Is it ok to try and change peoples perceptions of reality?
I used to walk around and try to change everyone’s world views, then It got boring because I was getting ostracized as being an overbearing douchebag. I rapidly began to figure out that people are going to believe whatever it is they want to believe. And its just not worth the being pissed off all the time trying to change that. It will never change. Once I did that I found a general acceptance for people I didnt want to converse with often and I wasnt so threatend by thier (wrong) opinion. Notice I am still acting the same way? I know thier OPINION is wrong… lol but I dont tell them I just let them believe it and try to find what we have in common that we can bond over and if there is any way we can profit from knowing one and other. Once I started doing that I started seeing people more as a group of assets I can associate with and get to know, as opposed to seeing people as out to get me with thier fucked up ideas and beliefs. Its enriched my life to a great deal. And It makes me come off more as an extrovert to people I am dealing with which is good because people generally like extroverts, I know I do.
Anyway, there really is no good to trying to change peoples reality, it just makes the person pushing look like an a-hole. Let people believe what they want, in life there must be soldiers, as well as generals and bishops.
Popularity: 8% [?]
My 1st inclination tonight after my asshole brother tried to drive me insane was to go grab the double bottle of Merlot from my truck and down it. Then I thought, that if I drank under those circumstances I might do something terrible now that I can no longer internalize pain like I used to. My episode the other week is proof of that. I am writing this screed in an attempt to disassociate myself from the fury I am feeling right now, the fact that my brother has the ability to get to me this deeply is of course a given he is my brother, but the fact that he intentionally tries to manipulate my feelings in order to benefit his sick fucking ego is what clinches the anger from me.
Before I lay my case out I think I should explain some background into how my mind is working these days, and where I am coming from. Essentially I hit a breaking point recently, for all the horrible things that happened to me in my life and I internalized the pain, guilt, frustration, horror, etc. It came to a head and I turned to drinking and marijuana to get past it since being sober can hurt so much. I know I don’t always express myself or my feelings and I tend to hold everything back in a futile attempt to keep the harmony, well, I am finished with that. This letter is the proof. I will now bullet point certain key information for your viewing.
Grandfather Callahan: I spent a weekend with my Aunt in Mass, It was wonderful to reunite with my family, one thing she told me though (not maliciously) was that my personality was sort of similar to her fathers, in that he was quiet, introspective, a deep feeler, very sensitive to life. He was also tortured by his father growing up, as an introvert he internalized all that pain and held it forever. Over the years as pain mounted and he stored it away it wore away at him. He turned to drinking to get through the night. Drinking as you know doesn’t change people, it reveals them. It removes the filter and brings those emotions to the surface. Evidently the poisonous pain he had swallowed for so many years had twisted him and brought out his demons. He became suicidal, abusive and wicked. He beat his children, his wife and got into fights; he cheated and sought comfort in alcohol. He ultimately committed suicide when he thought he was going to go to jail for being falsely accused of raping a woman. His story was tragic and horrifying. I know I am not him and there is no reason to fear his story, but I can understand how and why he did what he did. And I see similarities in my own life which quite frankly terrify me. Once one has swallowed enough misery we lose our ability to hold in pain any longer. So we extrovert it back out to the world, except instead of being minor as the new pain might have been its fueled with a beastly rage from the depths of hell, the depths of our inner world rife with demons we have held inside and suppressed. This is what I have found has been happening to me, I cant just be angry for a situation, I become infuriated and I want to destroy, smash, mangle, kill. I am doing all I can now to get those demons exorcised and out so I can live a life of peace and focus on getting myself on track. There is no reason to list the demons here, some people know some of them and others are grossly unaware. I have hidden the truth around, if people truly give a shit they will know where to look. But take solace in that I know what is wrong with me and I am working on it and I think I have caught it before it is too late, but it is definitely late in the game and the mask is wearing thin. I am running out of time.
You are probably wondering when I am going to get to the point, when I can affix a crux to this shit you are reading. I know this seems out of the blue and I am well aware that it will take most of you by surprise, but this has all been in my mind for years and I am only now getting around and gaining the courage to get it out. I am also aware that this is so obvious to my personality type. I hope you can read this with an open mind. And know that I am not trying to point fingers; I am just laying everything out in the open.
My family:
There is 1 word in my vocabulary that describes how I feel towards my family, Loyalty. I have the utmost loyalty and devotion to my family, they are all I have ever had in this world, and even though they are not perfect I loved them truly and without reservation and will for all time until I die. I cant help but to break down and cry when I even think of my family, the feeling is so intense that it breaks me down. And its not tears of pain or sadness they are utterly tears of love, the feeling is so powerful that its too much to express with my mouth, when I try and I bring those feelings to the forefront from my subconscious I am overtaken and I break down. I would gladly die for each and every one of them without a second of thought, I wouldn’t need a second, It would be pre programmed into my mind what to do because I know how I feel about them. And it’s this great and intense feeling that has brought me to the breaking point I am now at.
Mom and Dad:
Deeply flawed, the products of broken homes, they unintentionally hurt me in innumerous ways, not out of spite or anger, but out of their ignorance or their lack of understanding of their own lives. Whether it be the family I was denied, the poisonous feelings I was fed as a child, or the denial of reality that they embrace to live lives they can tolerate, I have gotten over all of that. I can forgive and understand why they do and did what they did and I do not hold anger any longer over it. I have come to grips with them as individuals and as a unit. Once I was able to do that I could lay down the anger and just return to loving them unconditionally and I feel that while our relationship is strained at times, we have a silent understanding of the situation and even though we have bad days when someone is in a foul mood and anger slips through, it is never intentional and it never lasts long. I truly love them and respect them for what they went through and even though they had issues and troubles I can forgive and see passed that and I feel happy with our relationship now in that it isn’t loaded with poison. Although I do have to work on being more up front with them, especially dad regarding my feelings about them. Its just difficult but I am working on it.
Ricky:
My 1st brother, I remember the times of your birth and near death like a haunting nightmare, crying in the hospital chapel not only for my dying mother but for my dying little brother. And then he survived and I made it my life’s mission to love him. Somewhere along the line I lost the ability to tell him this and it’s the greatest source of guilt in my life that wells tears up in my eyes even as I write this. I always knew he was sensitive and gentle and good, and in this I have always been so proud of him. He was selfless and free to give caring and love to those around him and for this I cherished him. I knew that he would be a part of my life through good or bad forever. I always wanted to protect him from the horrors we lived and I can only thank Christ that he doesn’t remember most or much of it. I have wanted to tell him the truth about everything for so very long, my feelings. Mom and dad, our lives, what happened to us, everything. I didn’t though, I kept it all inside. Especially the bad, because I couldn’t bare to burden him with the pain because he seemed content and happy with his life even though he struggles with things on occasion. I couldn’t in good conscious burden him any further, the part of me that wants to protect him will not allow me to. I watched him grow up into a fine man, and my heart brims with pride in that I believe I had at least some role in that upbringing. Ricky was the one to cradle me when I needed it most, and for that I am eternally indebted to him. The good far outweighs the bad in my mind, the only bad I can ever see that he has done has been far incidental and irrelevant, not even worth mentioning. And for this he will always be in my heart as one of the best people I have ever had the privilege of knowing. I would step in front of any bullet for him and take any fall for him. He is truly one of the purest people I know… and even though I have not been the easiest person to deal with his life and I struggled for so long to figure myself out, he has never turned me away. And for this I will love him forever.
Colby:
Colby is my brother and I know I am supposed to love him, and I do. Colby has great gifts, but Colby uses them for the wrong reasons. I watched Colby grow up and I always knew he would be the brightest star in any room of people. He can make anyone love him and he has the power to make other people feel so good. Somewhere along the line though Colby missed the lessons that I feel Ricky and I picked up. Specifically that there is more to the world than just who we are and what we want. Colby lives entirely on what Colby wants. I have seen him grow from an outspoken, jovial child who wanted for nothing and who had everything he wanted growing up into a self centered, egocentric, manipulator. Everything he does today he does for himself. The birth of his children, the marriage to his wife, his car accident, everything is all a testament to his self serving nature and ego. I have found him to be truly insecure in himself, and as such he uses other people to make himself feel better about himself. And when you don’t want to cater to his will he will coldly cut you off at the drop of a hat. He has no qualms with telling his brother who has ever been there to help him since the day he was born to not come around ever again and deny him the right to see his nieces because Colby felt disrespected even though he wasn’t disrespected. What kind of sick fucking ego maniac would do that for something so trivial? Either he meant it and he is truly a wicked person or he said it without meaning it, in which case he is a stupid wicked person. Because when he told me that, something inside broke, it might have been a heartstring I had attached to him. And for this he will be punished and so will his family. I have chosen to cut him out of my life until further notice. He uses my love for him like a weapon against me in fits of manipulation, he does this to everyone. From the way he abuses his wife, to the way he abuses me and Ricky, I have simply had enough. And I do not say these words lightly. I am finished with brushing this shit under the carpet to keep the peace and swallowing pain for him and bearing a cross for him. I cannot do it any longer. I find the urge to drink to get past the pain alarming and he is feeding it now while I am struggling so hard to get myself together. Everyone knows what Colby does, Colby is not smart enough to be subtle about what he does, but everyone keeps it quiet for him because they fear that he will cut them off or he will turn people against them or he will guilt trip them and manipulate them with their love. Using love against someone is the worst crime imaginable to me. I would rather he attack me, I can deal with that, but he digs deep into my heart and draws me in then hurts me. Many mutual friends and family have had this talk with me about him after he burned them or he stabbed them in the back by hitting on their women or he tried to fuck them out of money, and the word they used to describe him was “weasel”. Of course I defended him and tried to get them to “understand” tirelessly. Then he started stabbing me, not only in my back, but in my heart. And this is not something can handle any longer. So for this I must cut him out or I will grow to hate him, in order to love him I must separate myself from him. Until he can learn to be a man and to see the needs of others in addition to his own I can not be there with him. And that’s the torment of it all, my underlying motive has been always loyalty, I do not leave people behind, but my hand is forced. I have no choice. I must get my own self together and he is unraveling it, and I don’t know why he would want to do that, jealousy, anger, I don’t know, I do not understand how a brother could want to hurt a brother on purpose. And if he does it unintentionally then I do not know what to think… I still cannot be around someone who would unintentionally hurt me, hurt is hurt. He will undoubted read this letter and begin to circle his wagons and turn everyone against me, and I have already considered that, and I have decided that he can have them. I am willing to give them up and let him have them so he can continue to build the great monument to his pride and ego, I just want the freedom to solve my own problems, all I ever wanted was for us all to be happy. But for him to be happy he must be in control of everyone around him, and that impedes my ability to seek my destiny. I can only pray that he will figure this out one day so we can be brothers again, and when he does I will be the 1st one there, like I was when he was in the hospital, or when his children were born, or he had his 1st football game. I don’t know where it all went wrong and I know I am not entirely blameless for this, but I do know I would never use his love against him and I would never actively seek to hurt him or to hinder his life and his progress, I cannot say he would do the same for me though and for that I must for the sake of my own health draw back from him.
I have chosen to quit while I am ahead in this. I do not need people to love me to succeed in my life, I have great internal strengths and I have finally figured out who I am. This has been a long trip for me it took 28 years to find the peace I feel with myself. I have to tell this stuff to friends instead of my family because I know that it will not matter to them and if it does they will talk over me and try to control me. But those days are finished. I am finished with internalizing everything, I am finished with biting my tongue, I am finished with being addicted to my family. My life has become my own and I know this is going to be hard for some people to understand and accept, but this is the way it must be. I was headed for an early grave through a suicide, and I might have even considered doing it, I was sitting there one morning thinking that it would be easier to be dead than to be in pain. And then I had the sudden realization that THAT is exactly what being “suicidal” is. I thought it was much more, but it is not. From that day forward I began to study myself and my motives and it has taken a few years but I have gotten a good idea of it all. And I can say truly for the 1st time in my life I am happy and secure with myself and I can see opportunities instead of painful reminders of why I so desperately hated my life. And nobody knew. Nobody knew or cared to know, or take the time to break through my walls and get to me. I sought help from time to time and dropped subtle hints and no one was interested. So I sought my own help from within and I was able to stave off oblivion. I think that makes me a fairly strong minded person, but I am sure you will all think it makes me an asshole. And that’s ok. I don’t need that love any more, I have learned to be without it, and while that is sad and tragic it has helped me to survive. I know they do love me, but loving is only a part of loving, doing is the other half. I don’t want to point fingers it’s irrelevant at this point.
On a more positive note, I would like you all to know that I have indeed come to grips with myself and I know now what I must do to make my life work and the days of holding things in and being too devoted have come to an end. The larval phase and pupa phases of my life have finished and now I am going to sprout my wings. I will never hold back again, when someone must be punished they will be, when praised they will be. If they hurt me they will be cut out of my life. I have no more room left to swallow the poisons of life.
Popularity: 2% [?]
September 16th, 2009 Introvert
For the duration of my life thus far I have known I was not the most outgoing person. I knew all the answers in school but didn’t want to raise my hand, I knew what people were thinking before they realized they were thinking it but I never put it in their faces. I found it easier to just remain silent and let everyone else unfold naturally without any sort of manipulation. Some people I knew were very outgoing they had friends, they were “popular” a word that still makes me cringe on gritted teeth. I learned in time that I was an Introvert. According to pathology it means I essentially internalize everything from the outside and in and I hold on to it.
This acts as a sort of double edged sword. While one side gives me razor sharp and precise intuition that allows me to peer briefly into the future given the facts at hand, the other acts like a ticking time bomb, a computer collecting dust in its main ports slowly eroding and corroding in time. It is a strange, advantageous yet unhealthy duality. The ability to see and know, but the lack of ability to act naturally, which I know now comes with learning and time. If I only had been exposed to the inner workings of my mind from an earlier age I might not have swallowed so much poison from my life, which I feel inside like an angry caged brute in the basement of my mind, rattling its cell doors, looking for an escape. When it does escape, I cower in futile terror as it rages, stamps, tears and rips its way through the waking world, a shadowy alter ego fueled by negative energy. So far I have found that this beast is mostly self destructive, it will not harm people I love and care for, but how much of that is played into by the fact that what set the beast free is usually guilty feelings as opposed to angry feelings? So when I am smashing holes into the walls with my fists, am I actually beating myself in an angry, guilty disgust for my lack of an ability to “Do”?
I was once told that my Grandfather Richard had a personality very similar to mine. I can only imagine how horrible it would have been to grow up in his conditions, beaten and broken day after day by an angry abusive drunken Irish father. To an introvert, all he could do was to swallow that anger and misery and internalize it as his core system. So he was flawed by his childhood and as a man when he had his own children he continued the cycle from drinking to angry violent abuse. From holding Grams head to the floor under his boot with a blade to her neck and making my Aunts and Uncles plead with him not to kill her, to the broken jaws, the extreme punishments and depression which eventually lead to his suicide via gassing himself in an oven the night before he was supposed to go to court for “raping” a girl. In an ironic and sadistic twist of fate he was actually innocent of the charges, but he was dead before anyone could know. The final straw in a long series of events which destroyed my Grandfather and shattered his family forever.
I am deeply terrified of this situation. I feel the beast clawing away ever growing inside, but could I do those things to the ones I love as Richard did? He wasn’t always so abusive as I have been told, it wasn’t until he lost himself in the bottle that the beast truly let loose and began to burn their lives like a fire in a summer wind. My foray into drugs and drinking have showed me that I have the capacity to act violently when emotion overtakes my rationality. Like a torrent of water ripping down sand-blocks and dams draining into my fists, hardened and white knuckled, ready to swing, to swing and destroy with all the fury of hell.
How permanent is the beast and is there a way to starve him his affections he feeds on that doesn’t involve becoming an utter zombie? I don’t want to be like my grandfather, I don’t want to hurt my loved ones, but how can I not? At twenty-eight and change I feel the weight of my life crushing down upon me and I feel the sting and allure of the bottle or drugs. They seem like convenient temporary escapes, to just take that edge off. When I go sober and clean and I refuse to pollute myself I find that great depression will amass like clouds and the longer I go the darker they get until I become utterly self absorbed to the point where I feel nothing but the lonely stinging in my heart. Every heartbeat is like an eternity in solitary confinement. Which will leads me to two courses of action, Fuck or Flee. I can go find some woman to seduce, sex, and emotionally destroy or I can flee into myself with a joint, or a 12 pack. I can still feel the anguish in that state but its diminished and its like a free wheeling sense of freedom from my inaction. If the beast looses I smash things, if my family is there I break down and tell them I love them, if a woman is with me, I will ravage her vagina. The things I want to do when I am sober and I am taken by mood, but I hold back. Only in the lamented bliss of intoxication they are exponentiated to the umpteenth degree.
I must figure out how to get a grip before I allow this to destroy me. My brother tells me I am not my father or my grandfather, but he is mistaken. I am not them, but I AM them, I feel them inside me. Screaming raging spirits of good men destroyed by the pain and torture of reality. The reality that people know of in great novels, or the Jerry Springer show. I don’t think I can rise above my breeding, but I am at least cognitive of what I am doing on a semi conscious level. The other fear being, that they might have been as well.
Popularity: 4% [?]
The 1st time I smoked pot I was in college, I rolled a joint of schwag my cousin gave my at a gathering at my grandmothers house. I didn’t have EZ Widers or Zig Zags, so I remember ripping a page out of my roommates bible. Bibles are printed on that cheap thin paper and I thought it would work best in that case. I rolled it up, 2 joints 1 big one small, walked out of my dorm and took a stroll at night and smoked, and smoked and smoked. The paper burned dirty and left my teeth stained it also burned my throat. When I got back to my room I wasn’t feeling any different and I was disappointed. I never got high. For me the 4Th time was the charm.
When I moved to Memeres from the dorms, I had made a friend at work who was giving me slightly better weed. Still trash though. He sold me a quarter for 60 dollars and I remember rolling a joint and smoking it by the back of Memeres lot where the thicket began behind the satellite. The feeling was a surprise, I felt light, like I could float, and then that everything seemed so relaxed. I could hear the wind rustling by idly in the trees as sparrows and yellow finches made nest and sang their songs. I felt at peace, being high was incredible. “I can get into this” I say out loud to myself, I loved my voice, it was the first time I had. I would say I have been a “pothead” since that day forward. I didn’t want to drink, I didn’t want E or Coke, or Meth or anything, I just wanted to smoke pot. Of course I had to begin selling it, although I knew nothing about the price or amount to package or even who would buy. I was a novice pot head in an old stoners world and I didn’t know the rules or the boundaries. I also didn’t know that everyone and their mother smoked and that I wasn’t selling pot, that I was selling myself, my friendship, my connections. I didn’t sell very much, I didn’t hit up strangers and none of my friends were smokers which means I pretty much smoked it all to my own head.
Popularity: 5% [?]
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