Maybe not feeling anything is for the best.
When you don't feel empathy, you can show people who are too busy drowning in their woe reason. If you felt the same way they did, you wouldn't. Then what use would you be? Certainly not helpful.
Before I said that all of my problems could be blamed on sexuality. That isn't true. It's hard to find that rationale sometimes, but I'm sure there have been at least some problems I've had that weren't the result of me or someone else's sexuality. The problem is none of those problems were any of the ones I paid any attention to. Until now, at least.
Somebody told me that you can get a better picture of why your life isn't going in the direction you want if if you visually line up all of your values and set them next to your actions. I gave it a shot the other night and experienced a sad epiphany of why that was true for me.
First, the only value I could put down was being a good dad to Amelia. It was the only thing I could think of that I truly wanted. My subconscious, like the cliche smart-ass sitting in the back of some classroom, told me you can't be a good dad if you're dead.
I sat there with a journal for a moment in dismay. I've been a dad for a little over a year now and that never crossed my mind.
Once you're dead, you're nothing but an empty corpse or ash. Neither of those things have the capability of being a good father, a role model, a support, anything. No matter how hard you try to fight it, the only way you can argue with that is by personifying your memories of someone who once lived on those ash or that corpse. Even worse for me, if I were dead now, those memories wouldn't be any good anyways. I would've never have been remembered as a good father. I've been a loving father, as much as I can, but there's an enormous difference between being good and being loving.
I scolded myself for taking such little care of myself being that I was a father. I ignored the words disgusting and despicable that floated through my head. At least now I'm aware, I thought. At least.
I fought a cognitive dissonance between the desires of making a giant list of every reason I could name that proved I wasn't a good father and finding whatever my second value should be.
Actually having some values. The kid's in the classroom that is my subconscious snickered. The good dad's don't kill themselves guy threw a paper airplane at my head. I had to brainstorm for several minutes before I hit the real second second value would be.
Financial stability is what I finally arrived at after I halfheartedly wrote down being a good Christian. I meant no disrespect to those words but at the moment all I could think about them was how incredulously vague they were to me.
Financial stability is something you can unarguably look at no matter what religion you follow or culture you grew up with and determine is true or false. Me being financially stable is so heinously false that you can't even laugh at it.
I shifted a bit in my seat. I was so uncomfortably unaware of why I wasn't financially stable. That title was not one I'd claimed once in my life and it made me a constant beggar, dependent and insufficient.
I grew up with a disdain for spending any time thinking about how money would or should be spent. I had seen more marital discord by the age of seven than most people see in their lifetime. All the conflict that caused said discord that wasn't attributed to your father doesn't love me or I hate seeing your father's family was completely to blame on money. The problem was never that my parent's didn't have any of it: it was purely that they could never agree on how it should be spent or were nipping at one another's heels for how it had been spent. As a child I fantasized from time to time about how they might've never had any problems if they hadn't had any money to argue about in the first place. It was only half the time that I disagreed with that thought because I appreciate the life I had been spoiled with.
Shortly after I turned fifteen I got my first job. I had done odd jobs for my friend's parents and neighbors in the past for neat little chunks of cash, but had no idea of what a steady income was like. I had bought gifts for my girlfriend in middle school with allowance or birthday money I managed to save. That girlfriend, who dumped me for very valid reasons that at the time I deemed completely invalid based on the idea of what love looked like based on my parents. By the time I had a job I had been depressed for a good while and gotten myself into drinking, weed, and the prescription pills kids would bring to school from their parent's medicine cabinets.
I didn't get that job because I wanted to save for college, a car, an apartment, or anything noble like that. I wanted that job so I would have money for going out and getting high. Three or four hundred dollars every two weeks as a restless teen who spent his money on drugs was pocket change.
Two weekends? That's at least four different nights. If my friends didn't have jobs yet and I didn't want to be lonely that meant paying for their buzz too. Even if we weren't getting high that's still how it worked.
Eventually I had two jobs. I don't remember ever having over fifteen hundred dollars in my bank account. When I say that I mean that was, and still is, the most money I've saved- ever. I remember spending nights floating around other kid's back seats, being carted to pick up my paychecks that would be quickly cashed at Walmart and then spent on a ton of pot or liquor.
Even when I picked up dealing for a bit here the goal was never to make money. The goal was to either break even or end up short enough that I could cover another purchase with my next paycheck. My only concern was being able to get high before class every day and get high after.
I could go into detail about my scumbag-moocher rationale behind every penny I didn't save, but I regress. By the time I hit seventeen I had been on probation enough to find other activities to invest money in that would result in absolutely no return or imaginary return. At eighteen I had started selling belongings I didn't care about anymore to get whatever I could get my hands on.
You might be thinking, that's when you know you have a problem. You should've known that.
That was an easy argument because that argument isn't arguing that I had terrible spending habits. It argues that I have a drug problem. I didn't have a drug problem, and I can argue that at twenty-two I still don't. I'm completely clean and have been for a while. Back then the argument was that I simply wasn't addicted and I could stop if I wanted to. I was 'just killing time'.
I'm not very fluent in logical fallacies, but I'm 99% sure that arguing against an argument by proving something to be true that literally means nothing is a fallacy. For better words, a mistaken belief. A mistaken belief that would have me in over twenty thousand dollars in debt by the time I turned twenty-two. Over half of that debt accrued between years twenty-one and twenty-two. How? Two things. Credit cards and liquor.
I continued to not care about financial stability at all. Money was earned and money was spent. There was no rationale, and when, briefly, there was, whatever money had been saved was blown on liquor and fun the moment something 'bad' happened. Granted, I've never had more bad things happen in one year of my life than that year. I could list them all of, but its pointless; none of that justifies trading your stability for temporary escape from your problems. That's called instability, folks.
The first full-time job I had with a regular schedule and full-time hours began about five or six months ago and ended roughly fourteen days ago. For a period of time I felt hope because even if my finances weren't the best at least my income was steady and predictable. If you would've asked me at the time if I was 'financially stable' I would have probably said yes. It wasn't until I tried to kill myself again and got another job that I finally had the epiphany:
Stable finances doesn't mean a steady income, but it sure does mean not spending every penny you have because your income loses stability. I learned that lesson the hard way, apologies for the cliche.
I remember wandering the aisles at the bookstore I worked for and seeing the 'finance' subcategory in the Christian section. Back then I laughed. I don't have a plan to ever read any of those, but if the Bible actually has a excerpt about finances, I'd read it.
I think back to the bit of Galatians I studied in the group on Tuesday night. I know for a fact 'wealth' wasn't a fruit of the Spirit, but I assume financial stability would fit under 'self-control'.
Flashback to last night. I had rode with Steven to the hospital to have his cyst removed because he had determined me to be the 'best person' to go in with him to help calm him down.
I didn't know what he really meant by that, but I put up a fuss anyways. I eventually proposed that I'd go with if he let me drink first. Thinking about it now, I feel guilty and disgusted at myself because he truly only wanted my help. Plus, coercing your friend into letting you get drunk off of his liquor so you'll help him in his time of need certainly isn't an action that would prove I uphold the whole Be a good Christian value.
Almost as if on cue, the screen of my phone lights up.
Merry: What did you do for him?
I believe that not feeling anything was for the best because feelings are animal, irrational, and messy.
That isn't true. The real reason not feeling anything is good is because if I had felt anything I might've rejected my friend for the cruel distaste I felt towards him after that night before.
The real reason not feeling was good was because I might've said something hurtful and rude when he broke into a sweat and started acting like a terrified five-year-old the moment we stepped foot in the hospital.
The real reason not feeling anything was for the best is because when Merry told me last night that she didn't want to lead me on I might've gotten offended.
I might want to be a good Christian and value it, but ever coming close to being one is an entirely different ballgame. If there's one thing that shows those hideous colors better than anything it's being offended.
Instead, last night, aside from being a wicked and cocky jerk, I told Steven to come pick me up, waited with him until he got a room and calmed his wild, panic stricken, "Please don't let them kill me!", old gay self the best I could. Then I did the same thing in the room until the doctor gave him a look-over and said he wouldn't be able to help and that Steven should schedule an office appointment with a doctor to complete the procedure.
There were plenty of opportunities for me to be a jerk. I could've made fun of Steven. I could've rubbed it in his face that if he would've called before he left like I suggested we would've all never wasted those four hours of our evening. I could've irrationally and immaturely blamed him for the last night I got to talk to Merry on the phone that he ruined when I saw that for some reason she had actually thought she could've been leading me on. I could've really been a jerk unjustly because she insinuated she could lead me on.
First of all, I am glad I wasn't a jerk. Second of all, there was no way she could've led me on, because I already knew there was no way in hell that anything was going to happen between us.
I'm thankful I didn't feel any part of that because my pills helped me through pure synthetic ambition and adrenaline to hold myself floating above the waters of human emotion in which I would surely drown.
I'm thankful I didn't find myself suffocated by immature, irrational, animal, 'human' emotion because my third value ended up being mental stability.
Do my actions show that I value mental stability?
This might actually be a tough question. Is it mentally stable to repress all of your emotions with amphetamines and benzodiazepines because you've either forgotten or never have had any idea of how to handle them aside from perpetually repressing them?
I stand corrected by myself, a sentence in itself that screams mental instability, along with the cheers of students from the classroom of my mind where good dad's don't kill themselves guy sits and nails me with a spitball.
I peel back my notes on Galatians 5:13-26. Frustrated and unable to read my own handwriting, I crack open the Bible that Manny had so graciously gifted me and I hadn't remembered to thank him for. Before I can get to the page, Bring Me the Horizon's "Crucify Me" plays again in my head phones.
Headphones, "Crucify Me" by Bring Me the Horizon:
"I am an ocean, I am the sea,
There is a world inside of me.
Lost in the abyss, drowned in the deep,
No set of rules could salvage me.
Only a shipwreck, only a ghost,
merely a graveyard of your former self.
We just watched the waves crash over.
I've been cast astray."
Bible, Galatians 5:22-26
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And whose who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another."
I cock an eyebrow as I read the passage and my eyes hover over the words 'self-control' once more. I reluctantly admit that 'peace', 'self-control', and 'love' are things that tie hand in hand with mental stability.
They happen to be only only reasons I value mental stability. Otherwise, I'd say to hell with it, let me dream my life away, deluded and careless.
Realizing this I decide officially what my fourth value will be. I also decide officially I will be sinning tonight, and I will feel guilty about it.
Fourth value, be a good Christian.
Liquor, here I come.
Next
When you don't feel empathy, you can show people who are too busy drowning in their woe reason. If you felt the same way they did, you wouldn't. Then what use would you be? Certainly not helpful.
Before I said that all of my problems could be blamed on sexuality. That isn't true. It's hard to find that rationale sometimes, but I'm sure there have been at least some problems I've had that weren't the result of me or someone else's sexuality. The problem is none of those problems were any of the ones I paid any attention to. Until now, at least.
Somebody told me that you can get a better picture of why your life isn't going in the direction you want if if you visually line up all of your values and set them next to your actions. I gave it a shot the other night and experienced a sad epiphany of why that was true for me.
First, the only value I could put down was being a good dad to Amelia. It was the only thing I could think of that I truly wanted. My subconscious, like the cliche smart-ass sitting in the back of some classroom, told me you can't be a good dad if you're dead.
I sat there with a journal for a moment in dismay. I've been a dad for a little over a year now and that never crossed my mind.
Once you're dead, you're nothing but an empty corpse or ash. Neither of those things have the capability of being a good father, a role model, a support, anything. No matter how hard you try to fight it, the only way you can argue with that is by personifying your memories of someone who once lived on those ash or that corpse. Even worse for me, if I were dead now, those memories wouldn't be any good anyways. I would've never have been remembered as a good father. I've been a loving father, as much as I can, but there's an enormous difference between being good and being loving.
I scolded myself for taking such little care of myself being that I was a father. I ignored the words disgusting and despicable that floated through my head. At least now I'm aware, I thought. At least.
I fought a cognitive dissonance between the desires of making a giant list of every reason I could name that proved I wasn't a good father and finding whatever my second value should be.
Actually having some values. The kid's in the classroom that is my subconscious snickered. The good dad's don't kill themselves guy threw a paper airplane at my head. I had to brainstorm for several minutes before I hit the real second second value would be.
Financial stability is what I finally arrived at after I halfheartedly wrote down being a good Christian. I meant no disrespect to those words but at the moment all I could think about them was how incredulously vague they were to me.
Financial stability is something you can unarguably look at no matter what religion you follow or culture you grew up with and determine is true or false. Me being financially stable is so heinously false that you can't even laugh at it.
I shifted a bit in my seat. I was so uncomfortably unaware of why I wasn't financially stable. That title was not one I'd claimed once in my life and it made me a constant beggar, dependent and insufficient.
I grew up with a disdain for spending any time thinking about how money would or should be spent. I had seen more marital discord by the age of seven than most people see in their lifetime. All the conflict that caused said discord that wasn't attributed to your father doesn't love me or I hate seeing your father's family was completely to blame on money. The problem was never that my parent's didn't have any of it: it was purely that they could never agree on how it should be spent or were nipping at one another's heels for how it had been spent. As a child I fantasized from time to time about how they might've never had any problems if they hadn't had any money to argue about in the first place. It was only half the time that I disagreed with that thought because I appreciate the life I had been spoiled with.
Shortly after I turned fifteen I got my first job. I had done odd jobs for my friend's parents and neighbors in the past for neat little chunks of cash, but had no idea of what a steady income was like. I had bought gifts for my girlfriend in middle school with allowance or birthday money I managed to save. That girlfriend, who dumped me for very valid reasons that at the time I deemed completely invalid based on the idea of what love looked like based on my parents. By the time I had a job I had been depressed for a good while and gotten myself into drinking, weed, and the prescription pills kids would bring to school from their parent's medicine cabinets.
I didn't get that job because I wanted to save for college, a car, an apartment, or anything noble like that. I wanted that job so I would have money for going out and getting high. Three or four hundred dollars every two weeks as a restless teen who spent his money on drugs was pocket change.
Two weekends? That's at least four different nights. If my friends didn't have jobs yet and I didn't want to be lonely that meant paying for their buzz too. Even if we weren't getting high that's still how it worked.
Eventually I had two jobs. I don't remember ever having over fifteen hundred dollars in my bank account. When I say that I mean that was, and still is, the most money I've saved- ever. I remember spending nights floating around other kid's back seats, being carted to pick up my paychecks that would be quickly cashed at Walmart and then spent on a ton of pot or liquor.
Even when I picked up dealing for a bit here the goal was never to make money. The goal was to either break even or end up short enough that I could cover another purchase with my next paycheck. My only concern was being able to get high before class every day and get high after.
I could go into detail about my scumbag-moocher rationale behind every penny I didn't save, but I regress. By the time I hit seventeen I had been on probation enough to find other activities to invest money in that would result in absolutely no return or imaginary return. At eighteen I had started selling belongings I didn't care about anymore to get whatever I could get my hands on.
You might be thinking, that's when you know you have a problem. You should've known that.
That was an easy argument because that argument isn't arguing that I had terrible spending habits. It argues that I have a drug problem. I didn't have a drug problem, and I can argue that at twenty-two I still don't. I'm completely clean and have been for a while. Back then the argument was that I simply wasn't addicted and I could stop if I wanted to. I was 'just killing time'.
I'm not very fluent in logical fallacies, but I'm 99% sure that arguing against an argument by proving something to be true that literally means nothing is a fallacy. For better words, a mistaken belief. A mistaken belief that would have me in over twenty thousand dollars in debt by the time I turned twenty-two. Over half of that debt accrued between years twenty-one and twenty-two. How? Two things. Credit cards and liquor.
I continued to not care about financial stability at all. Money was earned and money was spent. There was no rationale, and when, briefly, there was, whatever money had been saved was blown on liquor and fun the moment something 'bad' happened. Granted, I've never had more bad things happen in one year of my life than that year. I could list them all of, but its pointless; none of that justifies trading your stability for temporary escape from your problems. That's called instability, folks.
The first full-time job I had with a regular schedule and full-time hours began about five or six months ago and ended roughly fourteen days ago. For a period of time I felt hope because even if my finances weren't the best at least my income was steady and predictable. If you would've asked me at the time if I was 'financially stable' I would have probably said yes. It wasn't until I tried to kill myself again and got another job that I finally had the epiphany:
Stable finances doesn't mean a steady income, but it sure does mean not spending every penny you have because your income loses stability. I learned that lesson the hard way, apologies for the cliche.
I remember wandering the aisles at the bookstore I worked for and seeing the 'finance' subcategory in the Christian section. Back then I laughed. I don't have a plan to ever read any of those, but if the Bible actually has a excerpt about finances, I'd read it.
I think back to the bit of Galatians I studied in the group on Tuesday night. I know for a fact 'wealth' wasn't a fruit of the Spirit, but I assume financial stability would fit under 'self-control'.
Flashback to last night. I had rode with Steven to the hospital to have his cyst removed because he had determined me to be the 'best person' to go in with him to help calm him down.
I didn't know what he really meant by that, but I put up a fuss anyways. I eventually proposed that I'd go with if he let me drink first. Thinking about it now, I feel guilty and disgusted at myself because he truly only wanted my help. Plus, coercing your friend into letting you get drunk off of his liquor so you'll help him in his time of need certainly isn't an action that would prove I uphold the whole Be a good Christian value.
Almost as if on cue, the screen of my phone lights up.
Merry: What did you do for him?
I believe that not feeling anything was for the best because feelings are animal, irrational, and messy.
That isn't true. The real reason not feeling anything is good is because if I had felt anything I might've rejected my friend for the cruel distaste I felt towards him after that night before.
The real reason not feeling was good was because I might've said something hurtful and rude when he broke into a sweat and started acting like a terrified five-year-old the moment we stepped foot in the hospital.
The real reason not feeling anything was for the best is because when Merry told me last night that she didn't want to lead me on I might've gotten offended.
I might want to be a good Christian and value it, but ever coming close to being one is an entirely different ballgame. If there's one thing that shows those hideous colors better than anything it's being offended.
Instead, last night, aside from being a wicked and cocky jerk, I told Steven to come pick me up, waited with him until he got a room and calmed his wild, panic stricken, "Please don't let them kill me!", old gay self the best I could. Then I did the same thing in the room until the doctor gave him a look-over and said he wouldn't be able to help and that Steven should schedule an office appointment with a doctor to complete the procedure.
There were plenty of opportunities for me to be a jerk. I could've made fun of Steven. I could've rubbed it in his face that if he would've called before he left like I suggested we would've all never wasted those four hours of our evening. I could've irrationally and immaturely blamed him for the last night I got to talk to Merry on the phone that he ruined when I saw that for some reason she had actually thought she could've been leading me on. I could've really been a jerk unjustly because she insinuated she could lead me on.
First of all, I am glad I wasn't a jerk. Second of all, there was no way she could've led me on, because I already knew there was no way in hell that anything was going to happen between us.
I'm thankful I didn't feel any part of that because my pills helped me through pure synthetic ambition and adrenaline to hold myself floating above the waters of human emotion in which I would surely drown.
I'm thankful I didn't find myself suffocated by immature, irrational, animal, 'human' emotion because my third value ended up being mental stability.
Do my actions show that I value mental stability?
This might actually be a tough question. Is it mentally stable to repress all of your emotions with amphetamines and benzodiazepines because you've either forgotten or never have had any idea of how to handle them aside from perpetually repressing them?
I stand corrected by myself, a sentence in itself that screams mental instability, along with the cheers of students from the classroom of my mind where good dad's don't kill themselves guy sits and nails me with a spitball.
I peel back my notes on Galatians 5:13-26. Frustrated and unable to read my own handwriting, I crack open the Bible that Manny had so graciously gifted me and I hadn't remembered to thank him for. Before I can get to the page, Bring Me the Horizon's "Crucify Me" plays again in my head phones.
Headphones, "Crucify Me" by Bring Me the Horizon:
"I am an ocean, I am the sea,
There is a world inside of me.
Lost in the abyss, drowned in the deep,
No set of rules could salvage me.
Only a shipwreck, only a ghost,
merely a graveyard of your former self.
We just watched the waves crash over.
I've been cast astray."
Bible, Galatians 5:22-26
"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And whose who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another."
I cock an eyebrow as I read the passage and my eyes hover over the words 'self-control' once more. I reluctantly admit that 'peace', 'self-control', and 'love' are things that tie hand in hand with mental stability.
They happen to be only only reasons I value mental stability. Otherwise, I'd say to hell with it, let me dream my life away, deluded and careless.
Realizing this I decide officially what my fourth value will be. I also decide officially I will be sinning tonight, and I will feel guilty about it.
Fourth value, be a good Christian.
Liquor, here I come.
Next
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