When I care about someone, I give my all. My loyalty is medal winning. I have a solid circle of friends, but you can always compare your circle of friends with mine – but I will share with you, I keep an esoteric lot. My friends not only bring me happiness – they bring me sadness – they bring me challenges. I fail sorrowfully to keep fair-weather friends. When I commit, it’s one made out of something stronger than carbon fiber or tungsten.  

I do not keep these types of relationships because I need to feel important or to brag that my friends are better than yours. I appreciate the differences that each of my nuggets of friends support me. Sadly, most of these people give me far more credit about who I am than I care to accept. I question their assessments all the time. I am fully aware of how unfair it is. It is dismissive of them and their tastes. This comes from a place of pure unadulterated pain. It comes from being underestimated, being misunderstood, and being distracted by avoiding further negativity.  

With about 85% of my circle of friends, I can share very candidly what is going on in my mind. Speaking openly about wanting to die leads to very deep and personal conversations one doesn’t share over a fondness of sports figures. Recently I was surprised by two of my friends, one an extrovert (like a sister to me) and the other an ambivert (like an uncle to me). One is a woman who has started to turn over to the ‘darkside’ becoming more like me, more curmudgeonly. Hearing about her battles with her own sanity gave me pause, as she shared the fleeting thoughts of being ‘gone.’ 

My other spontaneous surprise was the ambivert. I’ve known him for 25 years. I’ve known the other for 27 years. Long lasting relationships are important. Depth is important to me. Integrity is incredibly important to me. The surprise I gleaned from the conversation with my ambivert friend is that they have suffered from suicidal ideation far longer than me. They are older than me by 15 – 20 years. They just finally gave up their ideation 3 years prior. Like an unempathic piece of shit, I made the comment, “I do not think you know exactly how deep this goes” referring to the daily battle with suicidal ideation. I learned, in that moment, I was so far from right. Being wrong shouldn’t make you a moron, if you can accept your blame and move on without making the same mistake again.

My circle of friends is not just a bunch of random people of which we can get together once in a while to catch up on gossip, ridicule, or other superficiality. My circle of friends qualify as family because of precisely how deep those relationships are with each and every one of them. My romances offer no less stellar drive. Expendability, disposability, to be discarded, or any litany of terms synonymous to mean nothing short of: unwanted any longer, is exactly where my mind short-circuits. It is a surreal conversation to have one’s mother state factually, “I had the option to abort you when I was pregnant with you.” That helps shape your view of the world. Feeding into the novelty aspect, only to have it become so cyclical.

Knowing that feeling from childhood is a terrible thing to deal with. I, honestly, would never wish this upon any child. I have been in relationships with women who I see that treat their children like friends instead of being a parent. I came from a home heavy on discipline and authority. Love was shown intermittently, perhaps I have false memories. To say I felt loved as a child, I have virtually no healthy response. My own mother grew up in a very dysfunctional family of which she went to foster homes time and time again though her own childhood hell. Her 5 of her 6 siblings experienced the same lifestyle. Love wasn’t exactly openly offered to those children.  

My mother learned that people fucking hurt. It’s like having your favorite doll morph into a cactus – or part porcupine. Had the latter have manifested itself, my mother would gladly have loved that. She was the epitome of an animal lover. She became the imprinter upon me in the same way. She did not know how to give love; she didn’t trust people. She saw how family could turn on you. She had such lousy, broken examples of how to define family or any human relationship.  

She turned to lavishing her attention upon animals. When I tell anyone that I grew up in a pet-store, it has never been a joke. My mother gravitated to animals so much that she impressed a pet store owner to give her a job. I went with her each day. I stayed in the back room when customers were about and would wander around the store when customers left. I know the difference between a gerbil and a mudskipper. Lucky me, you must be cheering. My mother hadn’t been given a decent life plan. She made do with what she had.  

Backing up the story a bit, we learn that my mother married a military man who would be a womanizer and a drunkard. Neither of those two scenarios mix well in a committed relationship. She was impregnated by this man, and later divorced him, due to how violent he was. That era was a boon for that style of a husband. I never knew this guy, but gauging by the stories I heard about him, that would be corroborated by others later, I came to terms I didn’t want to be like him one iota.  

We all know life isn’t fair. Not only is it common sense any longer, it’s ingrained in us. We see some people who seem to have the easiest path in life. I’ve no insight into that kind of life. I didn’t have the worst childhood, but I honestly did have an abysmal one. My mother met an EMT who worked at a large metropolitan hospital. This individual lived out in the country. The man was a father from an earlier divorce, with no custody of his children. Well, look at the writing on the wall, will ya, ya goofy woman! 

She was poor, she was a young mother, and was a young, divorced woman. She found a man who seemed stable, financially, and to my recollection, that was the only prerequisite other than whatever new-fangled love that wasn’t physically abusive. This woman didn’t have the luxury of vetting this man, so we start with the rest of this. This man had his own demons. I never fully appreciated how fucked up this man was until later in life, when I reflected upon him.  The toxicity that he exposed my mother and I to, we didn’t have much of a chance to escape that.

A stalwart perfectionist, a non-physically abusive mate, and racist, what more could one ask for back in those days? As told in my earlier post, I held this man and my mother at bay with a filet knife digging into my chest at around the age of six. How was I supposed to know that was abnormal? The fact of the matter was, due to all of the simple math surrounding this relationship, this man only wanted my young mother, I was merely baggage, and the sensation was unavoidable. Am I here to just rag on my mother and her boyfriend? Not exactly. This is where shit gets interesting.  

I was an avid reader. I loved books because I was an only child, and these two people didn’t give me whatever everyone else had. I would hear plenty of freely thrown around racial slurs about those other than white people. As a white kid, for some odd reason, I truly was offended by this. It affected me, viscerally. Because of that drive to disparage the environment I was planted in, I went to the library often and picked out books about slavery and indigenous peoples. Even at a young age, with no one telling me as much, I was an innate apologist for these vilified peoples. I could identify with their struggle. They got shit treatment and shit goods.

Speaking of understanding a whole sub-set of people, I received more clothes from garage sales and clearance racks than I ever got new shiny clothes or toys, barring Christmas. It isn’t to say that I should have always received the fanciest and newest clothes but let’s just say I inherited budget clothes. I received so much ridicule for what I wore to public school. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know kids are cruel, blah blah blah. Those kids merely saw me from the same mirror reflection as my mother’s boyfriend. 

This all fed into the sensation of not being wanted. Considered too difficult to keep around. They did a fantastic job raising me at the time they wanted a social life, whilst I was still young. I was one of the lucky kids to be locked in my bedroom, with no access to any resources, like a bathroom. I would, in some cases, only get my meal well after they came back home. I was almost like that story, Flowers in the Attic, without any of the possible financial benefit. Stellar parenting, right? 

One time a sheriff’s deputy showed up while I was locked in my bedroom. He knocked on the door, and oddly enough one of my bedroom windows faced the very door he was knocking on. I was embarrassed, so I hid from sight as I couldn’t escape my room to answer his call. He was responding to the complaint someone anonymously called in about me being locked in a bedroom. It’s very difficult to relay to someone that type of humiliation in that situation. I do not expect many people to appreciate that level of fear.  

Later, the sheriff’s department showed back up to do the ‘wellness check’ to validate that there was in fact a lock on the outside of my door that adults would use to leave me unattended. I was around the ages of 11 or 12 at this discovery, finally. Never mind the fact that it was used since I was about 4. I was shipped off to my first foster home, removing me from that hell hole. The foster care, regardless of how tumultuous it was, was far more liberating than the seven or eight years of being locked up at all hours of any day so parental figures could conduct their busy schedule as they saw fit.  

That wasn’t my first foray into foster home care. The abuse changed from jailing me to more mental/psychological poisoning. The doubts I had as a human that I couldn’t do anything caused me to be dog-tailed well into my adulthood. While most people can see this timeline and think it’s easy to put this all to pasture, it isn’t so simple. It wasn’t until perhaps last year that the term; trauma, made any introduction into the troubled childhood I had. It didn’t resonate with me, it was the childhood I had. I couldn’t compare what others went through. I knew it was wrong and knew I didn’t wish to treat any child in my future in the same way I was.  

I believe it was around this time where I realized I wasn’t important to anyone. I’ve found that other adults I become romantic with eventually find I am not important. I am then, revisited, by all the ghosts of disposability, expendability, novelty, et al. As much as I do not dwell on my past, I instead focus so acutely on my future. Trying desperately to actively re-write my future history to have finally overcome these burdens. With each ‘failed’ relationship, that I invested heavily in, I look at myself, as the simplistic common denominator and reflect that I am the one who fucked it all up.  

No well-adjusted human being would accept these terms in life, so why do I? Probably because when I did seek help, it was trivial at the time – or I knew I would mess up and affect the outcome. I cannot abide by being narcissistic as my previous post suggested. I cannot allow myself to take advantage of people in the way others view me as their mat of free uses. I was just chatting with a friend about the pattern observed in my two last relationships with women. I am a calming presence during other people’s chaos. I offer myself to help console and help drag them out of their own hell, while I do not watch for the signs of the inevitable, be discarded, yet again.  

This isn’t really the pulpit of which I suggest people to seek a pity party. This is where my conflicted inner sanctum is questioning the basis of life if the bulk of humanity can be so short-sighted and get off steam-rolling people to make themselves feel superior, even if for a moment. Yeah, running a school bus over a broken person is fucking exciting – it’s so easy – relish the moments, motherfuckers, because I absolutely hope that the cosmos finally catches up to you in one fell swoop. I’ve been told about how karma is supposed to work, and the only thing I keep thinking to myself is — I sure hope I have ‘pre-paid’ my karma piggy bank with the shit I’ve dealt with. Sadly, I am reduced to a pulp of who I was. I am not the person I was meant to be because I have allowed life to feed the newsreel of other people’s fuckups in my mind, replaying them, making them personal, accepting that I am that common denominator again.  

To a rational person, this makes absolutely no fucking sense at all. EVER! The newsticker scrolling at the bottom says otherwise. The monkeys that brainwash us into thinking we deserve to be treated like shit – can stem from religions, philosophy, media, such as silly Hallmark Movies that show how the person who got shit on somehow triumphs – and get their own greeting card line. When I was attending school, there were many discussions about how we have reduced the size of the world by shipping shit from all over the planet to your living room. The access to regional goods is in the palm of our hands. We are stripping our world of its natural resources and feeding the entitlement of mankind, while shoving those who do the heavy lifting down a mine shaft. The exciting part is it’s all on reality tv, and we salivate when the fuse is lit to allow the mine shaft to cave in on those people whining about their efforts to make the world just a little better.  

None of this is license to say: I am a victim, please be nice to me or I will cry. Sometimes a receptacle that is overflowing with all of the caustic materials in life just collapses. Life is supposed to be somewhat precious. Life is supposed to be a great equalizer. As we see, time and time again, people, being as ingenuous as they are, have found ways to ‘game’ life. That means to them, some of us only look like game pieces to get to their endgame goal. When folks throw their hands up in the air saying, “Enough is e-fucking-nough” there isn’t subtlety in that message. It means as a receptacle, the materials entering their space to hold is fucking caustic. It is diminishing their structural integrity.

Please do continue to further your fascinating rhetoric and adopted theories on natural selection. Please continue to reduce people to the sum of their problems. Please make no room for empathy, since as Jesus once suggested, “Ye of no sin are free to throw the first stone” in adjudication of capital punishment. If you think you are above reproach, I would caution you to check your balance sheet once more, because someone with a slim modicum of pedantic energy may pin you to a cross of your own making. Looking back, at our receptacle of humanity, is tiring to see the same feature film. We need new actors with new scruples, who give a shit.

As always, I welcome any constructive criticism, or complementary theories, analogies, anecdotes. I would love to hear if you find these edicts of challenge useful or utter horseshit. Similar to the 90’s when the catchphrase, ‘Be Kind, Rewind’ was hailed as marketing genius. I need to come up with one that invites you to either subscribe, via WordPress or via email, like posts, or even comment on posts. The immediate feedback is useful for anyone. Thank you very much for reading through all of this drivel. Be well, stay safe, AND stay sane!