God is in constant communion with himself.
It made me feel a lot better having internal dialogue all the time, plus it resonated from what I had learned about being the master of your own mind from Buddhism.
I'd reluctantly started taking my anti-depressants again. Reluctantly, because I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be turning to God for those issues.
I felt my self shrug it off.
The last time I went to Church the, um... preacher preached about how God would send Jesus to punish everyone who rebelled against him.
It gave me a neat-o visual of Jesus wrecking people like shattered pottery.
After mass, this guy named Teeter came and talked to me about some Christian rehab that he'd suggest I go to.
If it hadn't required me to leave work, my cellphone, and my life behind for a solid five or six months at least I would've gladly humored the idea.
I asked why the whole deal with the cellphones and he said because of porn.
No disrespect here, but this was my argument:
Sure, it would be great to leave everything behind to go rehabilitate myself for an indefinite period, wind up leaving with a job and a place to live, but there was one inescapable issue:
I've been to rehab.
Not letting someone have their cellphone so they don't watch porn is only going to teach them what to do in order to not watch porn when they don't have their cellphone.
It's just like any other kind of rehab; you don't learn how to live in the real world, you learn how to live in rehab. Sure, I appraise it for all it was worth, but I didn't give it much of a second thought.
After being reminded of what had happened that one terrifying night back in 2014, I'd felt sort of... perplexed. In the weeks following that day, I floated on a synthetic mania while I pretended the scars in my memory weren't left behind. I sorted a lot of things out, preached to my parents, and eventually landed my own apartment ten or twenty miles north for college.
I digress, back to the present. In the last few days I had started feeling disconcertingly comfortable, and it was really starting to get to me.
I valued honesty. I valued being a good dad. I valued financial and mental stability. I valued being a good Christian. Unfortunately, something about all of those things seemed far too distant to actually be valued.
Sure, when the time came, I'd be ready, I told myself. I didn't really believe it, though. I'd gotten paid four days ago and already managed to spend it all before inquiring to realize that I'd get paid every two weeks.
Almost immediately after, I realized I had a phone bill, rent, child support, and food to pay for. None of which I had money for at the time.
On Monday I'd woken up to emails from both of the new jobs I had applied for. We're sorry, but we're moving forward with other candidates. Good luck!
My hope somewhat dwindled. I thought about praying, but what was I going to pray for.
"Dear God, help me out with... finding someone who wants to employ my odd-looking person?"
I was struggling with self esteem. It wasn't about sexuality, because I didn't have any desire to go looking for someone to fill a bottomless pit for a boy that was really only half of a human being.
My self esteem was hanging on the idea that not only did I not know who I was in a sense, but that I seemed to not care, either.
I'd 'jammed' with Kirk the night before. I use parenthesis because jamming was pretty difficult when I couldn't remember any songs to play, didn't write my own music, and couldn't carry a tune for the life of me. Sure, if I'd had days to practice and warm up, hours of free-time to remember what I'd learn, it would have been different. That wasn't the case though. I felt like a fool.
Kirk played me bits and pieces of songs he'd been writing.
He loved Jesus, and boy did it show in his music. He had the whole Christian-folk-rocker thing going to a T. I liked it, he sounded well thought out and fit his genre.
He asked me if I'd written anything, and I'd told him I hadn't. The truth was I'd never finished a single thing I'd written because the things I'd write about either screamed I'm sad and empty or I've given up and struggle with addictive tendencies. No inspiring, happy tunes. I'd hated it, I'd hated peoples reactions to it, so unlike Kirk I enjoyed playing music that other people had written.
After the jam session, when hours earlier I could tell there wouldn't have been any creative energy flowing, Kirk took me home because he had to drive somewhere the next day.
I asked him why he and all of his friends seemed to all live in one general area.
I'd guessed that it was because they were all centering their lives around their Church. For those of you who didn't know, a Church refers to a group of people.
I'd guessed right.
It was awesome, in a way, to see that many people all devoting themselves to one thing and centering their lives around something better than themselves. Praise God! I said silently, amused to no one in particular that it must've been what God wanted.
I realized in that car ride that the only parts of the Bible I hadn't ever understood were the parts about how people were supposed to relate to one another, or interact, or socialize.
Sure, following the golden rule was easy, love your neighbor as you love yourself. My issue was I really did not love myself. I had the idea that I'd rather be called out on whatever I was doing wrong so I could self correct, being mean was okay and even desired, and it was okay to criticize as long as you were being constructive.
Nope. Not by the Bible, it looked like. I didn't understand that, period. I felt like I was missing something. I didn't understand how people could just... be nice. I understood that having someone be nice to you was supposed to feel good but it kind of fell upon deaf ears for me, so to speak.
I'd actually had a fairly enlightening conversation with Merry a day or two prior. To my utter disbelief, Jesus never said you could be an asshole.
I know for some of you that might be common sense, but I was dumbfounded.
Jesus didn't want you to hate anyone.
I had to re-ask the same question two or three times. I'd spent the entire day ridiculing every man, woman, and child who passed me on the street, seen in a grocery, or even drove by me. I was supposed to NOT do that?
I think that marked the initial moment where my self esteem was knocked down a couple notches. Like, I was constantly critical of everyone I met. It was kind of my thing. I didn't know what would make me me if I didn't judge everyone around me to shape my behavior.
My wheels of my mental bike spun to no avail. I had to do some research.
Of course, instead of turning to the Bible, I turned to Google.
nice
adjective
1. pleasant; agreeable; satisfactory
2. fine or subtle
3. (of a person) pleasant in manner; good-natured; kind.
4. fastidious; scrupulous.
In my head, on a chalk board I drew diagrams and took notes over the words before growing ever-frazzled and threw my chalk and the floor, diving into the chalk board, breaking it.
My dumbfounded mental avatar went to smoke a cigarette, his head falling to his palms when he realized he didn't have any.
I went back to the conversation with Merry, and only gathered from it that you couldn't hate anyone.
Now, if you're like me, and think that would be easy the first time you read it, think again. Let me define hate for you.
hate
verb
-feel intense or passionate dislike
-have a strong aversion to (something).
-used politely to express one's regret or embarrassment at doing something.
-express strong dislike for; criticize or abuse.
noun
-intense or passionate dislike.
-denoting hostile actions motivated by intense dislike or prejudice.
Its a sin to have a strong aversion to something, unless that something is sin.
Its a sin to express strong dislike for something, or criticize or abuse.
Also, flashback to the first Church service I went to: It's also a sin to make a mockery of anything.
What on Earth was I supposed to do? It felt like my entire life had been spent having strong aversions to things, criticizing things, making mockeries of things, or abusing things.
Literally.
It felt like everything I did was wrong, every thought I had was wrong, and every everything that was anything was wrong.
How does one be pleasant? How does one be agreeable?I didn't even feel like I'd have the chance to do those things on a day to day basis, and often the opportunities I'd face lead me to situations I'd hate to be a part of, so I much-less-than-pleasantly would decline.
Maybe that's why you have almost zero friends, you prick, I thought to myself.
I couldn't stand it. I racked my head for solutions to a problem that didn't have any answer, and then it hit me.
nice
(of a person) pleasant in manner; good-natured; kind.
Okay, I had a starting point. Those three years ago when I'd forgotten how to make sense of anything for a while, the biggest thing I'd forgotten was my manners. I'd forgotten how to greet people, thank people, make requests to people, ask questions, everything. I didn't seem to want anything from anyone that I couldn't do myself so I just blatantly forgotten all of it.
Pleasant in manner.
What did that mean? Okay, I knew what it meant. But how does one be pleasant in manner without seeming like an insincere prick especially if the manners aren't a practiced thing for them?
I dropped my face to my hands and massaged my temples for what seemed like the twentieth time in the last hour.
I slowly, but surely came to terms with the fact that I'd have to learn how to be a person again.
God, help me.
A good person.
***
Part 2
"The dose maketh the poison." Paracelsus.
I hear the words echo in my head as I give in to another desire of the flesh and pop my -ehem- second dose of medicine for the day.
I argued back and forth with myself and decided I'd rather give up rest to rigorously self-analyze than spend another night in rest.
It sounded somewhat ridiculous, but I hadn't found a verse in the Bible (nor looked) that condemned it.
I'll always find my way to justify something if it hasn't been explicitly stated as sin or unlawful by a higher power.
The problem was I knew that if I had to justify something it was already wrong in the eyes of someone, and I knew it.
Alright, back to today's episode of Not Being a Hateful Person!
I valued being a good dad, financial and mental stability, being a good Christian, and I'm pretty sure all of those things, if a school project, would have not being hateful on their rubrics.
So far I was getting an F-. I didn't even notice that part of the rubric until now. Hence, here I am again, back in people school.
If taking medicine too late in the day knowing it probably would keep you miserably awake all night was part of the rubric, I'd failed that too, with flying colors.
The classroom was back. Some dweeb from the second to last row, in the row in front of the good dad's don't kill themselves guy raised his hand.
"You aren't going to be very mentally stable if you don't sleep before work tomorrow."
I, the teacher of this class, begrudgingly gave that kid an A+.
I'd asked Merry the other day for some guidance on the whole hatefulness thing and she might've well responded in Japanese because I hadn't a...
"Swearing is a sin!" some kid named Nguyen called from the back. "It also is offensive to the people around you and..." Manny's words echoed.
...clue what she meant. I asked questions and deciphered that it meant you couldn't be hateful, at all, ever.
So, since I had asked her about the Bible verses, and Manny probably wouldn't be able to get back to me until tonight at the earliest, since he didn't shape his life around his phone (like I did), I consulted the all knowing Google.
good-natured. adjective.
kind, friendly, and patient.
synonyms: warmhearted, friendly, amiable.
antonyms: malicious.
I remembered that back in first or second grade that my school counselor had told my parents that I was very mature but malicious in group settings. So, there you have it, folks. I've been malicious since day one.
Kind. Hmm. I know its kind to hold the door for people. That's about as far as that goes. No idea about the rest of it.
Friendly. I can be quite outgoing sometimes. I know how to accept a friendship, ask someone if they want to be friendship, to be best friends, to be precise, however I'm pretty sure that'd be a mockery of actually friendliness because I didn't mean a word of it. I was really asking do you want to think of me as asking to be best friends? would you like to feel inexplicably comfortable talking to me? Friends had always came and gone. To me, it was a meaningless token for a game at some arcade that would surely disappear one day, bought out by the next best renter.
Patient. I've been told I have the patience of a saint. I had no idea where that guy got that idea, because if you'd ask me what was one thing I hated, I would easily be able to tell you waiting. Time not spent doing what you wanted was time wasted. Time is the most precious thing we have next to money.
I'm assuming all that thought was 'wrong' by some rationale.
Warm-hearted. I've heard of people being warm-hearted, so I'd assume if you took it literally, it would mean not dead. While my body wasn't dead, I was certainly dead. I didn't even like spending time with kittens or puppies, because I knew that eventually they'd die and some poor soul would be forced to care for them until they did. I also knew that they'd be terribly sad every time someone's attention was taken from them to deal with the real world where puppies didn't matter. I'd been told I was cold. I suppose I really am.
Amiable. The word meant friendly.
Not me.
I had to define 'warm-hearted' because I knew that wearing a sweater or giving out hugs probably wouldn't cut it.
warm-hearted. adjective.
(of a person or their actions) sympathetic and kind.
Sympathetic. There's a word we haven't seen yet. I knew that empathy and sympathy were too different things, but since we're having a class session and we might as well, let's define sympathy.
An antonym of sympathetic was unfeeling. I already knew I had hit the mark with that one.
feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune.
the formal expression of pity or sorrow for someone else's misfortune; condolences.
understanding between people; common feeling.
support in the form of shared feelings or opinions.
I'd struggled with this for a long time too.
When I was really little, and my psychotic parents would ridicule each other for all their worth, my mother was an expert at sympathy fishing.
My dad was a hateful asshole, but he didn't mean ill, so as bad as he was don't go thinking so. My mother was just the one to show the hurt. I'd never really seen my dad feel anything but frustrating. My mother was all kinds of emotionally colorful; mania, dread, fits of anger, fear, sorrow, self-pity, you name it.
She'd have me come dab her tears away when she was crying after the fights. Or maybe I'd go and do it myself, knowing she'd done the same for me whenever I cried. Either way, I didn't feel much of it today.
I was cold.
Yes I could tell when someone was sad. I could read people pretty well. I just didn't know how to handle it.
Was I expected to dab away everyone's tears? Some people don't like being touched. I was told in school not to touch the other kids. I was a bit too huggy for a while. A little too close for comfort. Easy. I didn't like it anyways. It made you look like a push-over.
I'd read guides on how to deal with people complaining about their lives to you.
I'd tried my dad's method before. It didn't work.
"Oh, that happened to you? Well, you shouldn't feel bad, because here's why its eventually not going to matter..."
Nobody liked feeling that their feelings weren't real or not going to matter, even if truly they weren't.
Eventually I simply told everyone that whatever was happening to them sucked and that whoever's fault it was it happened to them I hated. That really was all most people wanted.
At least I thought so, until I met these Christian people.
I'm talking from my heart here, so bare with me.
They didn't want to hear that you hated whoever was responsible for their problems or why they should hate who you believed was responsible for their problems.
It was like they didn't even hear it. I was pretty dumbfounded until I heard the whole hate deal.
They'd literally just pray about it.
Ignorance is bliss. Not as in being ignorant as in being stupid, but as in ignoring the fact that yeah, I know this person is 99% probably to blame for my issues, or is at least the face of why I have issues, but instead of wasting time being hateful and angry I'm going to feel helpless and pray, giving it to God.
Part of me wanted to be upset, but another knew it was genius.
Hate wasn't a positive emotion, and these people, or God, had found a way to just skip over it, in every playful, childish sense of a skipping group of children on a playground.
Understanding between people; common feeling.
Now this was one I didn't even begin to have hope for.
Also, being that almost all the time my medicine let me focus myself from feelings of the lowest of lows, to the empty abyss, to the highest of highs, it was pretty difficult to share common feeling.
Plus, sharing the feeling wasn't exactly warm-hearted.
"I feel invincible!"
Seriously, if anyone came and told a normal person that, they'd be taken aback. It wasn't common sense to me because if someone came to me and said that, I'd cheer them on. I wouldn't even pause to think of why.
I didn't know if that was a problem or not. For me, at least, it felt positive.
I always seemed to be torn between feeling anything and everything or nothing at all. Still, I looked forward to these... not hating ordeals, because at least it gave me an idea of what shape I needed to mold my thoughts and words into to make sense to these people, or at least most people.
I was doing this for myself, honestly. I wanted to feel like I sounded sane even if I wasn't, or at least know that someone would be able to relate if they heard what I was feeling, even if I only showed a bit of it.
I felt good with the new realizations I'd come to, and felt grounded by the fact that it wouldn't be a solution to all of my problems.
Knowing that feeling unstoppable wasn't a relatable feeling didn't make me feel any different.
I had to reconstruct how I described what I felt so I could relate.
I had to get over my obsession with italics.
Manny was picking me up for Bible Study in what would supposedly be thirty minutes. I'd taken notice to him stating times nearly twenty to thirty minutes before his actual arrival, so I was apprehensive on how I'd continue to spend my time.
Contemplating how I'd spend my time led me to feel exhausted.
I regretted spending the typical number of hours a healthy individual would spend sleeping this weekend. To me, I had slept so much that now it seemed like an activity. Really, I'd only slept eight hours and probably less each night.
There were a couple of my friends I'd been avoiding, and I was starting to feel bad about it.
That wasn't how I wanted to be treated, however I did want people to be honest with themselves.
Thank you, God, for letting me see my daughter today.
Stefany had found it in her heart to let me FaceTime with Amelia until I had to go to work. It had been a solid thirty minutes, and even though I squirmed at the idea of not hearing music before work, I didn't say a word.
It was too much of a rarity, too neat to see. The only thing I was ashamed of was that I still had to argue with myself to enjoy it.
I felt enlightened, thoughtful, and at the same time weak. I knew that at the moment I felt unstoppable, but that the feeling wouldn't last very long. I knew at some point in the night, or the next day, I'd face temptation, and be very inclined to give in.
Why? Because I always did.
Maybe this time I won't, I told myself. Maybe this time I'll stay true to my values.
Being a good Christian means not sinning. I was beginning to think I'd go mad with all the abstinence I was faced with.
The classroom went silent.
It made me feel a lot better having internal dialogue all the time, plus it resonated from what I had learned about being the master of your own mind from Buddhism.
I'd reluctantly started taking my anti-depressants again. Reluctantly, because I wasn't sure if I was supposed to be turning to God for those issues.
I felt my self shrug it off.
The last time I went to Church the, um... preacher preached about how God would send Jesus to punish everyone who rebelled against him.
It gave me a neat-o visual of Jesus wrecking people like shattered pottery.
After mass, this guy named Teeter came and talked to me about some Christian rehab that he'd suggest I go to.
If it hadn't required me to leave work, my cellphone, and my life behind for a solid five or six months at least I would've gladly humored the idea.
I asked why the whole deal with the cellphones and he said because of porn.
No disrespect here, but this was my argument:
Sure, it would be great to leave everything behind to go rehabilitate myself for an indefinite period, wind up leaving with a job and a place to live, but there was one inescapable issue:
I've been to rehab.
Not letting someone have their cellphone so they don't watch porn is only going to teach them what to do in order to not watch porn when they don't have their cellphone.
It's just like any other kind of rehab; you don't learn how to live in the real world, you learn how to live in rehab. Sure, I appraise it for all it was worth, but I didn't give it much of a second thought.
After being reminded of what had happened that one terrifying night back in 2014, I'd felt sort of... perplexed. In the weeks following that day, I floated on a synthetic mania while I pretended the scars in my memory weren't left behind. I sorted a lot of things out, preached to my parents, and eventually landed my own apartment ten or twenty miles north for college.
I digress, back to the present. In the last few days I had started feeling disconcertingly comfortable, and it was really starting to get to me.
I valued honesty. I valued being a good dad. I valued financial and mental stability. I valued being a good Christian. Unfortunately, something about all of those things seemed far too distant to actually be valued.
Sure, when the time came, I'd be ready, I told myself. I didn't really believe it, though. I'd gotten paid four days ago and already managed to spend it all before inquiring to realize that I'd get paid every two weeks.
Almost immediately after, I realized I had a phone bill, rent, child support, and food to pay for. None of which I had money for at the time.
On Monday I'd woken up to emails from both of the new jobs I had applied for. We're sorry, but we're moving forward with other candidates. Good luck!
My hope somewhat dwindled. I thought about praying, but what was I going to pray for.
"Dear God, help me out with... finding someone who wants to employ my odd-looking person?"
I was struggling with self esteem. It wasn't about sexuality, because I didn't have any desire to go looking for someone to fill a bottomless pit for a boy that was really only half of a human being.
My self esteem was hanging on the idea that not only did I not know who I was in a sense, but that I seemed to not care, either.
I'd 'jammed' with Kirk the night before. I use parenthesis because jamming was pretty difficult when I couldn't remember any songs to play, didn't write my own music, and couldn't carry a tune for the life of me. Sure, if I'd had days to practice and warm up, hours of free-time to remember what I'd learn, it would have been different. That wasn't the case though. I felt like a fool.
Kirk played me bits and pieces of songs he'd been writing.
He loved Jesus, and boy did it show in his music. He had the whole Christian-folk-rocker thing going to a T. I liked it, he sounded well thought out and fit his genre.
He asked me if I'd written anything, and I'd told him I hadn't. The truth was I'd never finished a single thing I'd written because the things I'd write about either screamed I'm sad and empty or I've given up and struggle with addictive tendencies. No inspiring, happy tunes. I'd hated it, I'd hated peoples reactions to it, so unlike Kirk I enjoyed playing music that other people had written.
After the jam session, when hours earlier I could tell there wouldn't have been any creative energy flowing, Kirk took me home because he had to drive somewhere the next day.
I asked him why he and all of his friends seemed to all live in one general area.
I'd guessed that it was because they were all centering their lives around their Church. For those of you who didn't know, a Church refers to a group of people.
I'd guessed right.
It was awesome, in a way, to see that many people all devoting themselves to one thing and centering their lives around something better than themselves. Praise God! I said silently, amused to no one in particular that it must've been what God wanted.
I realized in that car ride that the only parts of the Bible I hadn't ever understood were the parts about how people were supposed to relate to one another, or interact, or socialize.
Sure, following the golden rule was easy, love your neighbor as you love yourself. My issue was I really did not love myself. I had the idea that I'd rather be called out on whatever I was doing wrong so I could self correct, being mean was okay and even desired, and it was okay to criticize as long as you were being constructive.
Nope. Not by the Bible, it looked like. I didn't understand that, period. I felt like I was missing something. I didn't understand how people could just... be nice. I understood that having someone be nice to you was supposed to feel good but it kind of fell upon deaf ears for me, so to speak.
I'd actually had a fairly enlightening conversation with Merry a day or two prior. To my utter disbelief, Jesus never said you could be an asshole.
I know for some of you that might be common sense, but I was dumbfounded.
Jesus didn't want you to hate anyone.
I had to re-ask the same question two or three times. I'd spent the entire day ridiculing every man, woman, and child who passed me on the street, seen in a grocery, or even drove by me. I was supposed to NOT do that?
I think that marked the initial moment where my self esteem was knocked down a couple notches. Like, I was constantly critical of everyone I met. It was kind of my thing. I didn't know what would make me me if I didn't judge everyone around me to shape my behavior.
My wheels of my mental bike spun to no avail. I had to do some research.
Of course, instead of turning to the Bible, I turned to Google.
nice
adjective
1. pleasant; agreeable; satisfactory
2. fine or subtle
3. (of a person) pleasant in manner; good-natured; kind.
4. fastidious; scrupulous.
In my head, on a chalk board I drew diagrams and took notes over the words before growing ever-frazzled and threw my chalk and the floor, diving into the chalk board, breaking it.
My dumbfounded mental avatar went to smoke a cigarette, his head falling to his palms when he realized he didn't have any.
I went back to the conversation with Merry, and only gathered from it that you couldn't hate anyone.
Now, if you're like me, and think that would be easy the first time you read it, think again. Let me define hate for you.
hate
verb
-feel intense or passionate dislike
-have a strong aversion to (something).
-used politely to express one's regret or embarrassment at doing something.
-express strong dislike for; criticize or abuse.
noun
-intense or passionate dislike.
-denoting hostile actions motivated by intense dislike or prejudice.
Its a sin to have a strong aversion to something, unless that something is sin.
Its a sin to express strong dislike for something, or criticize or abuse.
Also, flashback to the first Church service I went to: It's also a sin to make a mockery of anything.
What on Earth was I supposed to do? It felt like my entire life had been spent having strong aversions to things, criticizing things, making mockeries of things, or abusing things.
Literally.
It felt like everything I did was wrong, every thought I had was wrong, and every everything that was anything was wrong.
How does one be pleasant? How does one be agreeable?I didn't even feel like I'd have the chance to do those things on a day to day basis, and often the opportunities I'd face lead me to situations I'd hate to be a part of, so I much-less-than-pleasantly would decline.
Maybe that's why you have almost zero friends, you prick, I thought to myself.
I couldn't stand it. I racked my head for solutions to a problem that didn't have any answer, and then it hit me.
nice
(of a person) pleasant in manner; good-natured; kind.
Okay, I had a starting point. Those three years ago when I'd forgotten how to make sense of anything for a while, the biggest thing I'd forgotten was my manners. I'd forgotten how to greet people, thank people, make requests to people, ask questions, everything. I didn't seem to want anything from anyone that I couldn't do myself so I just blatantly forgotten all of it.
Pleasant in manner.
What did that mean? Okay, I knew what it meant. But how does one be pleasant in manner without seeming like an insincere prick especially if the manners aren't a practiced thing for them?
I dropped my face to my hands and massaged my temples for what seemed like the twentieth time in the last hour.
I slowly, but surely came to terms with the fact that I'd have to learn how to be a person again.
God, help me.
A good person.
***
Part 2
"The dose maketh the poison." Paracelsus.
I hear the words echo in my head as I give in to another desire of the flesh and pop my -ehem- second dose of medicine for the day.
I argued back and forth with myself and decided I'd rather give up rest to rigorously self-analyze than spend another night in rest.
It sounded somewhat ridiculous, but I hadn't found a verse in the Bible (nor looked) that condemned it.
I'll always find my way to justify something if it hasn't been explicitly stated as sin or unlawful by a higher power.
The problem was I knew that if I had to justify something it was already wrong in the eyes of someone, and I knew it.
Alright, back to today's episode of Not Being a Hateful Person!
I valued being a good dad, financial and mental stability, being a good Christian, and I'm pretty sure all of those things, if a school project, would have not being hateful on their rubrics.
So far I was getting an F-. I didn't even notice that part of the rubric until now. Hence, here I am again, back in people school.
If taking medicine too late in the day knowing it probably would keep you miserably awake all night was part of the rubric, I'd failed that too, with flying colors.
The classroom was back. Some dweeb from the second to last row, in the row in front of the good dad's don't kill themselves guy raised his hand.
"You aren't going to be very mentally stable if you don't sleep before work tomorrow."
I, the teacher of this class, begrudgingly gave that kid an A+.
I'd asked Merry the other day for some guidance on the whole hatefulness thing and she might've well responded in Japanese because I hadn't a...
"Swearing is a sin!" some kid named Nguyen called from the back. "It also is offensive to the people around you and..." Manny's words echoed.
...clue what she meant. I asked questions and deciphered that it meant you couldn't be hateful, at all, ever.
So, since I had asked her about the Bible verses, and Manny probably wouldn't be able to get back to me until tonight at the earliest, since he didn't shape his life around his phone (like I did), I consulted the all knowing Google.
good-natured. adjective.
kind, friendly, and patient.
synonyms: warmhearted, friendly, amiable.
antonyms: malicious.
I remembered that back in first or second grade that my school counselor had told my parents that I was very mature but malicious in group settings. So, there you have it, folks. I've been malicious since day one.
Kind. Hmm. I know its kind to hold the door for people. That's about as far as that goes. No idea about the rest of it.
Friendly. I can be quite outgoing sometimes. I know how to accept a friendship, ask someone if they want to be friendship, to be best friends, to be precise, however I'm pretty sure that'd be a mockery of actually friendliness because I didn't mean a word of it. I was really asking do you want to think of me as asking to be best friends? would you like to feel inexplicably comfortable talking to me? Friends had always came and gone. To me, it was a meaningless token for a game at some arcade that would surely disappear one day, bought out by the next best renter.
Patient. I've been told I have the patience of a saint. I had no idea where that guy got that idea, because if you'd ask me what was one thing I hated, I would easily be able to tell you waiting. Time not spent doing what you wanted was time wasted. Time is the most precious thing we have next to money.
I'm assuming all that thought was 'wrong' by some rationale.
Warm-hearted. I've heard of people being warm-hearted, so I'd assume if you took it literally, it would mean not dead. While my body wasn't dead, I was certainly dead. I didn't even like spending time with kittens or puppies, because I knew that eventually they'd die and some poor soul would be forced to care for them until they did. I also knew that they'd be terribly sad every time someone's attention was taken from them to deal with the real world where puppies didn't matter. I'd been told I was cold. I suppose I really am.
Amiable. The word meant friendly.
Not me.
I had to define 'warm-hearted' because I knew that wearing a sweater or giving out hugs probably wouldn't cut it.
warm-hearted. adjective.
(of a person or their actions) sympathetic and kind.
Sympathetic. There's a word we haven't seen yet. I knew that empathy and sympathy were too different things, but since we're having a class session and we might as well, let's define sympathy.
An antonym of sympathetic was unfeeling. I already knew I had hit the mark with that one.
feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune.
the formal expression of pity or sorrow for someone else's misfortune; condolences.
understanding between people; common feeling.
support in the form of shared feelings or opinions.
I'd struggled with this for a long time too.
When I was really little, and my psychotic parents would ridicule each other for all their worth, my mother was an expert at sympathy fishing.
My dad was a hateful asshole, but he didn't mean ill, so as bad as he was don't go thinking so. My mother was just the one to show the hurt. I'd never really seen my dad feel anything but frustrating. My mother was all kinds of emotionally colorful; mania, dread, fits of anger, fear, sorrow, self-pity, you name it.
She'd have me come dab her tears away when she was crying after the fights. Or maybe I'd go and do it myself, knowing she'd done the same for me whenever I cried. Either way, I didn't feel much of it today.
I was cold.
Yes I could tell when someone was sad. I could read people pretty well. I just didn't know how to handle it.
Was I expected to dab away everyone's tears? Some people don't like being touched. I was told in school not to touch the other kids. I was a bit too huggy for a while. A little too close for comfort. Easy. I didn't like it anyways. It made you look like a push-over.
I'd read guides on how to deal with people complaining about their lives to you.
I'd tried my dad's method before. It didn't work.
"Oh, that happened to you? Well, you shouldn't feel bad, because here's why its eventually not going to matter..."
Nobody liked feeling that their feelings weren't real or not going to matter, even if truly they weren't.
Eventually I simply told everyone that whatever was happening to them sucked and that whoever's fault it was it happened to them I hated. That really was all most people wanted.
At least I thought so, until I met these Christian people.
I'm talking from my heart here, so bare with me.
They didn't want to hear that you hated whoever was responsible for their problems or why they should hate who you believed was responsible for their problems.
It was like they didn't even hear it. I was pretty dumbfounded until I heard the whole hate deal.
They'd literally just pray about it.
Ignorance is bliss. Not as in being ignorant as in being stupid, but as in ignoring the fact that yeah, I know this person is 99% probably to blame for my issues, or is at least the face of why I have issues, but instead of wasting time being hateful and angry I'm going to feel helpless and pray, giving it to God.
Part of me wanted to be upset, but another knew it was genius.
Hate wasn't a positive emotion, and these people, or God, had found a way to just skip over it, in every playful, childish sense of a skipping group of children on a playground.
Understanding between people; common feeling.
Now this was one I didn't even begin to have hope for.
Also, being that almost all the time my medicine let me focus myself from feelings of the lowest of lows, to the empty abyss, to the highest of highs, it was pretty difficult to share common feeling.
Plus, sharing the feeling wasn't exactly warm-hearted.
"I feel invincible!"
Seriously, if anyone came and told a normal person that, they'd be taken aback. It wasn't common sense to me because if someone came to me and said that, I'd cheer them on. I wouldn't even pause to think of why.
I didn't know if that was a problem or not. For me, at least, it felt positive.
I always seemed to be torn between feeling anything and everything or nothing at all. Still, I looked forward to these... not hating ordeals, because at least it gave me an idea of what shape I needed to mold my thoughts and words into to make sense to these people, or at least most people.
I was doing this for myself, honestly. I wanted to feel like I sounded sane even if I wasn't, or at least know that someone would be able to relate if they heard what I was feeling, even if I only showed a bit of it.
I felt good with the new realizations I'd come to, and felt grounded by the fact that it wouldn't be a solution to all of my problems.
Knowing that feeling unstoppable wasn't a relatable feeling didn't make me feel any different.
I had to reconstruct how I described what I felt so I could relate.
I had to get over my obsession with italics.
Manny was picking me up for Bible Study in what would supposedly be thirty minutes. I'd taken notice to him stating times nearly twenty to thirty minutes before his actual arrival, so I was apprehensive on how I'd continue to spend my time.
Contemplating how I'd spend my time led me to feel exhausted.
I regretted spending the typical number of hours a healthy individual would spend sleeping this weekend. To me, I had slept so much that now it seemed like an activity. Really, I'd only slept eight hours and probably less each night.
There were a couple of my friends I'd been avoiding, and I was starting to feel bad about it.
That wasn't how I wanted to be treated, however I did want people to be honest with themselves.
Thank you, God, for letting me see my daughter today.
Stefany had found it in her heart to let me FaceTime with Amelia until I had to go to work. It had been a solid thirty minutes, and even though I squirmed at the idea of not hearing music before work, I didn't say a word.
It was too much of a rarity, too neat to see. The only thing I was ashamed of was that I still had to argue with myself to enjoy it.
I felt enlightened, thoughtful, and at the same time weak. I knew that at the moment I felt unstoppable, but that the feeling wouldn't last very long. I knew at some point in the night, or the next day, I'd face temptation, and be very inclined to give in.
Why? Because I always did.
Maybe this time I won't, I told myself. Maybe this time I'll stay true to my values.
Being a good Christian means not sinning. I was beginning to think I'd go mad with all the abstinence I was faced with.
The classroom went silent.
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