Personal Journal

Digging in the Dirt

It hits me when I listen to music, I guess. The need to write. I have charaacters in my head and they need to get out soon. I don’t know why I like to hurt, but I do. I was vacuuming the stairs the other day, and I don’t even remember what song I was listening to, Robert Plant, I think, “Ship of Fools” and I felt it. There is a musical note that stretches through the entiretly of my life, and it is this sound of my soul screaming, and it’s comforting to me. Maybe it’s because I know that it means I’m alive, and that I know life at its core is good, no matter what feelings you extrapolate from your own passage through it. Maybe it’s the first sound a neonate hears upon exit from the womb – some permanent scarring occurs, and the first thing given you is a psychic and emotional scar. I believe it’s not a bad thing to feel this way. I believe my understanding of it and my ability to turn it to good use, to feel it and make emotive writing of it, is proof that it is good.
I don’t mind being sad. I don’t mind being alone. I don’t mind pain in a wide varieties of incarnations. We are all unique and we have some unique way of relating to the world, and perhaps this is mine.
I am sad today. Over stupid things, perhaps, or perhaps not over stupid things, and stupid things are what I see making me sad because it’s more convenient than seeing what is really making me sad. I know I had … I brought upon myself, in fact, an encounter from my youth that I damn well knew would affect me in this way. I posted a message on the message board for my old high school alma mater. Knowing the truth of it is that there are a dozen people from that place that I could kill and live with myself, if only I could be assured that I wouldn’t have to go to jail for it.
But two of my classmates died my senior year, one I didn’t know, one I did know somewhat well. My sophomore year we rode the buss together. And my mom would pick him up many a morning as she drove me to the bus stop on her way to work.
I don’t know why I posted there. More parts of my psyche screamed at me NOT to post there than any which told me to do it. In fact, nothing that I rely on in my instincts told me to post there. I’m trying to prove something, but I don’t know what. Perhaps it’s an experiment. Perhaps I want to see if those people whom I am still loathing will come out of hiding and prove to me that they are worthy of my continuing hatred (and strangely, it is hatred). Perhaps they will come out and say something redeeming of themselves or of me.
I certainly hated who I was back then, for the most part. But I hated who they were equally. I count none of them friends, then or now. Acquaintances at best, and people with whom I felt less uncomfortable being around.
Does one need to forgive one’s self for having been a misfit socially backward and altogether unexceptional youth? From the age of 12 to the age of 16 who I was is now someone whom I hate. I hate myself in the past; that can’t be particularly helpful or even rational. I hate the mistakes I made. I hate the pain I brought upon myself. I hate that I didn’t know better. God how I hate what I did, what I was.
And of course, it went on to make me who I am, and I find my cognitive self finding problems with my emotional self… Those mistakes brought on the pain that helped you decide how you needed to live if you were ever to be happy. I had no confidence. None. It would be years and years until I developed it. I know of no one who developed it as late as did I.
I hate those people from high school because of what they did to me when I made social mistakes. But I hate myself for having made them. Without people being the asses that they are, I wouldn’t have developed my navigation system, which is what steered me to find a happy way of being.
I don’t remember anything positive from the time I was 13 maybe 12, to the time I was 16. I’m sitting here trying to think of anything that I remember that was good during that period in my school life, and I can’t find anything. I don’t know what to do with all of these feelings at the moment.
I think that a part of me in this life has always wanted to make someone else hurt the way that I hurt. I say that, knowing the will is there, but that the act of doing so would be wrong. I don’t want to be responsible for making someone feel that way. I believe that morally I could not bring myself to do it to an innocent person. But if I could go back and make Ron DeRosa or Louis Brutico hurt the way they made me hurt, and if I wouldn’t go to jail for it, my god would someone have to hold me back from doing it.
I think that god is bringing something up here because it is a forgiveness issue. I have always believed that hate only hurts the self. Well, not always, but I do now. And I don’t know what to do with the hate that I have for those classmates and for that young stupid version of me.
I know that the last time I found myself hating someone so much, the first thing that was necessary to stop the hating was for my wound to heal. It did, and I let go of hate.
With regard to my hatred of my past self, that’s not at all rational to me right now and I don’t know what to do with it. For those bastards in school, obviously the pain has never healed sufficiently (it’s not that I think these things heal completely, but you reach a point where there are scars that only hurt when you touch them, and you learn not to touch them much or pick at them). Maybe this is all just a flareup of having posted there on the high school site – in essence, I dug at the scar.
Well, there you have at least some of what I was hiding from in my earlier entry..
And yes, people have told me that I need psychological help. I get it from time to time, don’t worry. I’m one of the lucky ones. I KNOW right from wrong.


It is never too late to be what you might have been. -- George Eliot
Courage to start and willingness to keep everlasting at it are the requisites for success. -- Alonzo Newton Benn