I feel like I’ve been walking in darkness and finally a light was switched on for the briefest instant. That one flicker and a mirror was revealed to me. I saw myself. I’m beginning to think it happened in a dream. I’ve had so many that I can only just recall lately. I’ll be doing something and suddenly that little television in my head will click on for a moment and I’ll have a feeling. Something’s changed. I know what it is, to be honest.
Words can be like a knife. They can make you or break you. They can encourage or send you into despair, and are at the mercy of mood.
My father used to always say to me that to see the future you must learn the past. “Read your history,” he used to advise. To understand ourselves I believe we must first look to where we came from. The most startling thing to me, is that I see now what I only suspected before. I see it now more clearly than ever: I am my father, whether I like it or not. He used to do this, what I’m doing. He used to work and work and never be home. He would sleep so early, that I recall having fits about it as a child. He eats and eats, rarely ceasing, and he hardly ever leaves the house for any reason besides buying groceries. He’s jealous to a fault, moody, depressing, has very low self-esteem, and now I’m beginning to believe, is as suicidal as I am.
I hate him at times, and my trust of him is extremely limited. There’s something a little too animal about him that I don’t like. I see it when he drinks, and it concerns me. I see that same thing in me, but the scary thing is that it does not take the drink to bring it out. I’m much less restrained, and I guess that it is likely because I am young. Given time, maybe I would be smarter about it. Maybe I would not do so many terrible things when I believe no one to be looking.
There is something needy and weak in me that I will not speak of. It’s there, thwarting every damn step of progress I make. I deny it. I deny myself. I don’t believe we have to be what instinct tells us to be. I believe we can be what our head tells us we should be. We can overcome anything, any flaw in our design if only we choose to use that power. If I did not want to be depressed, perhaps I could stop it. Yes, I will forever be leaned toward it, bent in that direction, but if I fought it enough, maybe I could overpower it, mask it, at the very least. But I don’t. I no longer try, and maybe that is because I have seen doom, I have seen death, and I like what it has to offer me. It holds in its fold all that I have never had. Rest. Peace. Chaos denied. Life snuffed out.
The answer is there. I found it before, I was only sidetracked. And back to the path I go. Alone, always alone. We must do what we must do. In the end it is not ourselves that must be denied, but those who would dare pretend to hold sway over us.
I am not my father if I so choose. I am not anyone at all but who I wish to be. I see a future of darkness and much more misery to come, and I see myself sitting in the dark surrounded by half-empty bottles and broken furniture. I am nothing but hate and temper and loneliness. Apart they are nothing. Together I see them as a key to salvation. I can be free of this prison, or I can take this cell and reside within it, make it my own.
What does it matter, really? I have been this way so many times before. I get down this path and it becomes too dreary, so I turn back. I get frightened. I don’t like the person I see. Some kind of dark, apathetic thing that looks at death and laughs and scorns anything that would value its existence. That person is only terrible because others have told me she is.
The truth is of my choosing. The way this goes is up to me. And if I should decide to go how I see myself as almost destined, my will won’t be denied.
You have a lot more faith in what it means to be human than I’ll ever find. Selfishness is the back drop of everything, and there’s way too much ugliness beneath. The way society is structured is to feed into that ugliness (I’ve always thought). And then I ask myself what’s the benefit in lying to myself, pretending to be happy? It takes more energy, there’s no guarantee I get anything better for it. There’s actually more of a chance others will try and take advantage because I’d be forced to trust. I can choose to be one thing or another, but at the end of the day I think how much is taken out and what’s given back makes the decision real and a little more complex than will power alone. Maybe I ask why too often; always wanting to figure out what justifies the action I might choose to take.
I’d like to think the majority of human beings on this earth want to be better than they are, that they want to evolve and grow, but it looks like they just want to get more of what’s going to make them comfortable in their own ways. When it comes to the option of fighting oneself or giving in, it’s always easier to give in. I think what’s different is that although people are similar, no one has the exact same experiences, no one has the exact same soul. You may be similar to your father, just as I am similar to my own, but the very fact we recognize this changes what we’ll turn out to be. The choices we make don’t have to be so difficult or take so much out of us when we can see the whole picture and identify what makes us different–the experiences that do set us apart.
Anyway, I know I’ve probably strayed far from what you’re even talking about. You already know how it is. There’s power in what we do and don’t do, and it’s always going to be what affects our lives, even if it has no impact on other people directly. How you feel toward one thing or another can shift so easily and I guess that’s the part of being human that I fall into most often. Just disregard what I’ve said; I’ll probably regret every word the moment I click submit….