Listen to that deepest impulse

I don’t know how long this will go on for. I don’t know if it will ever be healed or go away, if it will let me live as other people do. I cannot give any guarantees to myself, or to anyone.

No amount of ‘sleep hygiene’ can guarantee a dreamful night. Positive thinking and mindfulness is not going to achieve much more than temporarily helping to cope – at worst it divorces you from your own being. All the new found things, breakthroughs in ‘gut health’, yoga and all that, is not the ticket.

All you can do for sure is listen to that deep impulse, let it manifest in you. It is you, you are not separate from it. Being aware of it will not fulfil it, there is no ‘pure consciousness’ which can perceive back upon itself. When a child cries do you tell them to be ‘aware’ of the reason why they are crying and expect them to be ok with that? I should hope not! You would listen to why they are crying and try to deal with the cause, to soothe their fears if they are unfounded and provide their needs if they are unfulfilled.

Likewise we cannot turn off or turn away from the manifestation of our deep impulses, our deepest pain. For me it manifests as insomnia and discomforting states. They can wipe me out, destroying a routine, disabling me.

But I have stopped using Valium to guarantee me a dreamless night’s rest. If I cannot make it to something the next day, unless it is extremely important, I have to accept I cannot make it. I will listen to the body-wisdom, even in its most debilitating states. This is the only long-term way to move forward.

Actually listening, playing out subconscious movements in the dark, holding the deep wounds and acknowledging them tends to work for me. It lets me rest, it fades into the background. It might never go away, but the more I can deal with it and accept it, the more confident I become that I will never again fall into a total abyss.

Adapting to cope or thrive in this society is not a way to be healthy and true – I have seen how brutalizing it is to those around me. It is an illusion and a sad one. We must fight to transform the world we live in, allow people to live out their pain and be dormant whenever they need to be. Wounded adults will never bring about a peaceful, enlightened society. Ignorant, power-hungry fools know not even themselves – how can they know anything of the world around them.

What would it mean to transcend your own self and be able to function despite the screams of your soul? It would be to live inauthentically, something capitalism demands of us. The destructiveness of our society results from such detachment. It is all around us, and it is all because we are afraid of nature in its truest and nearest manifestation: in ourselves.

When you next lay awake at 3am, unable to sleep, tossing and turning, rather than try to wipe yourself out with pills ask: what is this deepest impulse trying to tell me? Why is my body on strike, what is trying to come to the surface…

 

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Depression – breaking it all down (Part I)

I am not one of those people who believes that depression is all about thought processes, behaviour and ‘life style’. It is something far more deep reaching and fundamental than that. You cannot think your way out of depression, just as you cannot think your way into it.

However, I still see the important role of thinking in keeping you there once you are there and the dreaded making a bad situation seem worse!

Depression for me makes all the bad things seem inevitable and the source of the bad things far more powerful than it truly is. It is like a wall of despair, a vast amorphous barrier, so tall you cannot possibly see over, or around it. But when we focus in on this behemoth, we see that it is made up of individual components, and our perspective is that of someone hunched, low and defeated.

Stand up to your full height and the wall, whilst still imposing, is not so large. Focus in, and though you will see the strength of your enemy, the weak points also reveal themselves.

Breaking it all down –

My new direction is to break it all down in my mind; to dispel this mythic image of an undefeatable, invincible, inevitable foe. I know that the hostility of capitalist society is a very real thing, not just an imagined enemy. But lets use our imagination too break it down into realistic components.

Nature is being destroyed by the machine, but cracks in the pavement are full of life, chopped down trees unexpectedly sprout a thousand branches, certain species thrive even in this era of mass extinction. In ten years time an abandoned neighbourhood will become a wild garden, in a hundred it will become a grove, in a thousand there will be nothing left of it, strangled and hidden by thriving life. Nature is going no-where, and it is never far from regeneration. This ancient thing is more resilient than us, and we will always live in its beautiful shadow.

The officials who keep the machine running, do they truly believe in what they are doing? Would they not rather be pursuing some goal more true to themselves, spending time with their children, resolving emotions they have repressed, exploring and finding themselves? The amount of coercion and brainwashing needed to keep people in their place to blunt their true dreams and ambitions is proof positive that most people, even those in positions of power, are themselves led along and trapped by the madness of civilization. The lack of self-knowledge and true ambition, this is a reason to pity the machine-servants, hypnotized by digital screens, life void of meaning but for the targets from above and the will of invisible figures more powerful than themselves.

Advertising is everywhere, shallow, crass, idiotic pleas for conformity. But there is nothing democratic about advertising; it is there, but who wants it there but the sad corporations trying to control our choices? No one is really taken in on a conscious-level; eyes are rolled on the tube, people take the piss out of the sell-out celebrities, a bad pun elicits a long groan. Deep down, a subconscious lever may have been triggered, a greater sense of dissatisfaction and desire to go on holiday to ‘discover life in Greece’ (or whatever). But this is again an affliction – how many of us would vote to give powerful corporations thousands upon thousands of square metres of space to try and influence our decisions? The ubiquity of advertising only demonstrates how fucked up property and power is in our society, not the democratic will of the people. Some of the more idiotic populace might find advertising interesting or be consciously duped by its bullshittery, what can be done for such a hopeless minority?

It can be a loveless existence suffering from mental illness. You are vulnerable and need to be loved more than most people, but that same vulnerability makes trusting others difficult, and that same hurt makes you less desirable. The lack of strength and stability is a massive turn off. Month after month of failure and rejection makes the chances of finding a woman who is interested seem less and less likely, a feedback loop of frustration and disappointment. But all this doesn’t make things impossible, only more difficult. The spiral down into despair is one that is hard to avoid here; it is informed by the deep subconscious wounds and triggers of childhood, but it is not inevitable. Am I totally helpless and disadvantaged by this depression and anxiety? Everything to do with this mental illness and the abuse of the past makes the whole sphere of love much harder for me. Still, the act of breaking down how mental illness is contributing to isolation and lack of love dispels the mist, promotes understanding. It is the gargantuan wall which leads to despair, not the individual bricks. Maybe through understanding things will change and improve, though I cannot promise this to myself or anyone else. At least they cannot get any worse. Going from things are hopeless to who knows what can happen, I will have no judgements is a massive luxury for me at the moment. Neutrality – feeling neither loved or unloved, does not feel so bad.

End of Part I

The long trail of tears

The long trail of tears leads back to the two original abusers, the abusers of my genesis.

So many of the struggles and problems now stem from lack of self-confidence, a sense that my feelings are not my own, that I do not matter at all, that I am worthless and deserving of punishment, that I should constantly monitor myself and feel guilty, that just as I cannot trust even myself nor can I trust others, that I should turn my anger and rage at being abused against myself, even to my own self-destruction and death, than to level it where it belongs.

Lack of self-confidence, lack of trust, it is keeping me here in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Believe me when I say I spend every day planning and plotting an escape from the witch I have to share my current existence with. The death-energy of this crone leeches my own soul, I need to plan escape routes and getaways, one day meet ups with friends and events. Anything to be elsewhere, away from the sound of spluttering and coughing and an old person complaining about their slow death.

But there is nowhere to go, or a strong voice inside says this, and I do not have the self-confidence to compete with people in this horrible capitalist system. And it is no mystery, it is because two abusive people used to fight each other, and fight me, and anyone around them. Two deranged gods locked in a death-spiral, who left the land they were to steward a desolate wasteland. For the first twenty years I was witness to that.

Now I am on the fringes of that harmful, deranged little culture they created from not knowing any better. Just at the fringes, so close to the edge, so close to an escape. But it is society that throws up the walls, its not just those two who were abusers, it is the very government that is supposed to look after vulnerable people like me. They run the anxiety-machine, the treadmill, the hate-engine. There is no turning to them.

The past repeats itself over and over again. I confront the past because I don’t want it to control me, not because I want to live in it. Why would anyone want to live in such horrible, abusive conditions? Childhood for me is synonymous with violence and humiliation, why would I hold onto it?

Those who do not face their past will repeat it. True to form, the cycles are repeating themselves, the same derangements exist, even if watered down by time. The inanities of that family, now like old dragons sitting on their hoards, people disconnected from themselves because they had to repress everything to survive the struggles of the world, or just for their own lack of responsibility.

Yet I must still bear that responsibility and the humiliation of semi-dependence. A burden which destroyed so much of my life and yet is all I know. The subconscious connection formed in childhood is unbreakable, so I must live with an unfixable situation, at best a stand-off of silence with pitiful liars and tyrants.

If you never had to face this, you should count yourself lucky. When I am attacked by horrible people and dark spirits I know how to deal with them, and I expect them to be there. They will never defeat me, no matter how long it takes before they are extinguished and never again face me.

And none of this is to lay blame or deny responsibility. It is to find why I feel the way I do, and how to free myself from it to truly move on, and move away from the endless cycle of violence and abuse. For those within it there is nothing I can do, each must choose for themselves the path they tread.

It all falls apart…

I have always known of the entropic nature of things. Things naturally decay, wear away and fall apart.

From the earliest age it is possible to be sentient, I was. I was quickly made aware that the world is full of violence and danger, and immediately had to adapt to survive in that world.

I never had a good ‘take off’ into this world. From day one, I had to endure and survive violent, demeaning abuse at the hands of a non-father figure. His vile words were just as powerful in destroying my sense of good, justice and worth as his chaotic beatings.

So I have been under no pretentions about this world, and the sheer scale of evil and injustice in it. I never fell from grace or lost my faith, because it was never there to begin with. I know chaos and violence, for I have felt it with my own senses.

The nature of the world, if you put it in flowery euphemistic language, is change. But if you are brutally honest with yourself, it is entropy. Things fall apart, break down, collapse and die. They do not flourish forever, they fade and lose their colour. Even good things collapse, the best King imaginable will die, his castle crumble, his benevolent Empire subverted.

I am actually at terms with this reality, and I do not lament it. There is still space for some good to occur in life, to meet some good people, and achieve some moments of happiness. It is worth making the whole of your ‘journey’ before you naturally perish, life is not all sadness and misery.

What I am sad about is the sheer pace of entropy in my own life. Things fall apart quickly, they unravel before they are complete. Looking back at this year, it is unravelling and collapsing at a high rate. Much of what I achieved is dissipating. I have left a growing community I was part of, suddenly feeling the need to leave and cut myself off it. None of the relationships with women I pursued came to anything; those rose-lined paths led to dead-ends every time, walls of coldness which did not answer to my humanity. The band I helped to hold together was too much of a burden for my lacking energy, so I must let everyone down before we have really had a chance. Maybe some of those strands can be picked up again along the line, maybe not.

It seems that my lacking, brutalized core makes any sort of stable foundation impossible. Solid, lasting achievement, long-term relationships, these things seem intuitively difficult for to get to. Lack of confidence or openly feeling worthless is pointing towards a life of alienation and celibacy. It repulses others and denies trust, as well as crippling me and forcing me to let go of what I hold onto. It isn’t the only part of me, there is much that is loyal and good and strong, but the darkness is a strong one which emerges like a demon at the most inopportune times.

I know everything falls apart eventually, nothing is forever. But if only it did not collapse into entropy so fast.

What hasn’t dissipated or decayed is a deeply felt sense of injustice, of being wronged and violated. All of my songcraft and wordcraft is about it, all of my creativity channelled into understanding and expressing these sentiments.  This could possibly be the strongest thing I ever feel in my life, greater than any love or achievement or anything. I only need to imagine where I could have been if not for this deformity and disability, a past of violence and shame, to feel that this sense of being wronged is justified. And to imagine a society which was not so demeaning to people of colour, and so callous toward its ‘poor’. Imagine if I had enablement and privilege, the kind of which I see in the closest people around me, what I could have done with it with all this creativity and resourcefulness.

In Winter 2016 it all fell apart and I had to start again. It was a painful process, and on balance has led me nowhere better – just somewhere different. Now again, not two years on, I have to repeat something similar.

I am getting old enough to realize my patterns now, to know what I can and cannot depend on. The eventual decay of all-things is still there, hanging over us all like a spectre. Perhaps the one consolation is that I can always be ready for it, and laugh in its face as it laughs in mine when it comes to our final meeting.

The worst thing about disability…

My difficulties are compounded, the spiral leads downwards.

A lack of energy or confidence > Inability to socialize > Depression > Low mood and energy.

A mental health disability is hidden inside. You can’t see it – people assume you are a ‘normal person’, expected to cope with what everyone else copes with.

But most people do not have to cope with the compounded factors of mental health disability. To deal with those, traumas, collapses, indignities, poverty and the hostility of a sick government institution or capitalist work place… it doesn’t seem possible.

It is like gazing up at an immense wall when you are already bleeding, wounded and tired.

All of these compounded factors themselves compound into a living hell of frustration, and of course the tingle of despair that leads you back into depression. The cause of mental illness is psycho-logical and obvious.

Mental illness has left my confidence all but broken. Project after project starting, gaining momentum, then going nowhere. Lack of social skills or confidence makes moving forward extremely difficult, internal collapse leads to outer collapse, it all falls into a pointless fucking heap. So many people have no one to support them, and some times I am one of them.

This isn’t to say it is impossible to make it, to be loved, to be independent and useful. But it is much harder. For some it is too hard.

Not everyone has the same personal history, so why are we expected to be equals in the machine? That expectation and all the self-righteousness that comes with it, from all the mindless workers and their masters – that is what destroys my confidence every day.

Some people brutalized me a long time ago and now huge gaps have been left in my memory, where trauma has turned past events into one long, dark blur. Who will account for this, who will care about it enough to try and mitigate it and give me a fighting chance?

Much of my energy is spent staying afloat, in not drowning. There is no way to fake this – you can see the effects on a person, the worklessness and lovelessness and hopelessness.

No one would choose this.

 

The Alienated Man (finds his home)

I am not alone.

Naturally alienation goes hand to hand with isolation, but it is not true.

I am feeling the extent of my socialization, how far I have fallen into the pit.

The malaise inside me, the toxic poison, is spread far and wide.

It is one thing to know it intellectually, but this is still an isolating experience. The intellect is in me, I go round and round in it.

But after reading the ‘manifesto’ of another alienated young man, I really started to feel that is was not just about me.

Low self-esteem, sexual frustration, humiliation, abuse, neglect, isolation, no belonging, no tribe, no purpose… this is the life of a lone outcast. It is the promise of a painful, lonely, unfortunate life.

Attraction to someone, romantic or otherwise, is not purely an individual matter. It depends on being identified with a tribe or community. The alienated male is the ultimate outsider, he doesn’t belong to anything. This is what repulses people from him, not necessarily his own character. But alienation is all he knows, the sweet sense of belonging given or earned by others not yet his, or not enough to nullify the dangerous darkness and resentment bred by wasted, lonely years.

Not all alienations are the same. I feel much distance from other alienated males, who often see no further than their own shadow. My alienation is partly productive – a distancing from a sick and destructive society, and the evils of patriarchy. I am glad I do not fit in, to a degree. This does not make my alienation healthy or righteous – I am yet to find my tribe, the collective that will enable real change and real struggle to happen.

But perhaps I, as a total ‘loser’ in the eyes of society, am perfectly equipped to engage with questions of alienation, drag myself out of this dark pit and maybe encourage others to do so also.

It really feels like I am finally going somewhere, coming to realize the patterns which have caged me. I want to scream and lash out – not to hurt people, but certainly to express the power of my feeling to those who are doing the hurting!

If only men could express themselves more freely and without guilt, how much less suicide and murder there would be. If only we put the blame where it truly lay, upon the shoulders of patriarchal giants who watch us ‘lesser’ beings be destroyed at their feet, who laugh and humiliate down at us. If only we dared challenge the polite society which allows people to fall through the net, distributes wealth and opportunity unequally, disconnects us from the world, ruled by insanely short-termist, stupid bickering politicians and nihilistic businessmen. When there is an explosion of violence or a suicide, these motherfuckers have blood on their hands.

It is no law of the universe that a percentile of men will be fucked up, alienated and vulnerable. We can have a society far less violent and far less deranged if we wanted it. Perhaps people are afraid of the void, of realizing how pointless their labours are, afraid to aspire to anything better than the nihilism of spiritually dead capitalism.  But by daring the dark tunnel of truth we can come out into a world better than this one.

That is to all the people who said I was a cynic all these years! The ‘cynicism’ was necessary to break chains, now I am free, terrifyingly free, to dive deep into myself and the cosmos and emerge, flawed and never-complete, but still empowered enough to howl in rage at the prison we have created for ourselves, and howl for freedom for all.

The unimaginative masses who couldn’t see beyond capitalism, the underachievers who conform to earthly power for fleeting pleasures, the unambitious workers who gave up their dreams to step onto the treadmill and escape themselves – the multiplication of all these short-fallings is the slow death of the world itself! Just ask the climate scientists, and just look at the dispossessed figures on every high street.

But I do not want to paint a dark picture of gloom, because I do not believe it! There are lots of good people out there, good people with good hearts striving for the right kind of change.  Connecting with them is the short-term solution to alienation, and together with them we can build the long-term solution of post-capitalist society.

The alienated, frustrated, lost and lonely male need not be so for long. He can mature, challenge the misogyny around him for something uplifting and magnanimous, he can find the love he seeks once he dares look deeply into himself, learns to laugh at his contradiction, sees women as human beings rather than ‘angels and whores’, realizes that sex and power is not an elixir of self-completion. He does not need to compare himself to ‘alpha’ males or entitled, enabled white middle-class this, that and the others. We can free ourselves from these ‘ideals’ whenever we want, for those ideals are based on an othering, and othering is always a violent affair. Only the most malicious of humanity who benefit from othering and trampling others might want such a system – fuck them!

Two fingers up at the patriarchy, and then a hammer for its heart!

Lets go back into our feminism and our socialism, but also remember that an advocacy for men is necessary and nothing to be guilty for, so long as it avoids the landmine strewn hells of misogyny which stain this movement for recognition. Men need advocacy and can learn much from (the saner-strains of) feminism!

We can rise again! Alienation is just a passing phase, belonging awaits all creatures of nature and spirit, which we inevitably are.

There might always be some void inside us, some capacity to feel alienation and distance from the world around us. I believe this to be a painfully necessary evolutionary adaptation, to prevent society from solidifying too much, or going fucking insane without anyone to say ‘hold on, this is fucked, lets change it’. And further, I believe that like all creatures of the cosmos we face a nature of beauty but also terror, and that all beings experience some degree of naturally occurring coldness and anxious void at our ambivalent situation.

But the great void cannot be endured forever, we need to get a hold on it and regulate it. Cynicism and distance are necessary but must be tempered with intimacy, the intimacy we all need as bio-spiritual creatures.

My own days of alienation must come to an end!

Broken Masculinity

A broken man, already void and empty inside, reaches out for love. Why, because it is all he can do to have some kind of presence. He feels like he needs it, if not to complete himself then just to exist as anything other than an isolated wraith, haunted by his own inferiority. When that love is denied, he is blasted off his feet as if by a  thunderbolt, his heart races with anger and a well of black rage immediately starts to bubble. No matter where he may have been, he is taken back to that place of psychological hell, dragged there in an instant, a child abandoned, abused, battered, humiliated, again and again and again.

I have experienced the above for most of my adult life. When I write about broken masculinity it is not as a psychologist, not as an outsider, and not as some enabled bald prick in a suit on a panel show with a fake city-scape background. It is from the ground up, from within the shattered fragments of a wounded psyche, from experience and from the heart. I know what is fucking-men-up in society because I have to live with it almost every day. Having the intelligence to know the causes does not help, being aware of the source does not ease the wounds. Nonetheless, it has become an object of interest of recent, and maybe I can shed some kind of light on it, and promote some understanding.

Abuse, neglect and childhood trauma have caused my own emotional frailty and instability. This makes being turned down into rejection, and rejection into a total refusal of recognition, something that I have been desperately seeking to make up for the void. And this void is deeper than most, and darker than most.

Women must be empowered to make their own decisions, and men cannot feel entitled to women’s bodies. It must be the case that all sexuality is consensual and non-coercive, which in turn means that the dynamic of proposition > acceptance / refusal is a necessity. People have a right to say no, and they do not need a reason to do so.

This means men need to face the fact that rejection is a necessary part of a just social dynamic. But this is not just an intellectual exercise. It requires being able to cope with rejection, which broken masculinities cannot do so well. Not whilst they are unsupported, disenfranchised, humiliated. Not whilst we live in a patriarchal society, which we sadly still do.

The standards set by society are subconscious projections of what we should be, ideals cast out by an emergent conflux of minds over history. The lion glorifies its roar, the bird glorifies flight, the fish glorifies its reflexes – those who project most powerful society’s values are those who can succeed at them (in subconscious bias) Being expected to be able to form relationships for instance, requires a certain emotional grounding and stability. Those without deep wounding and mental illness can form relationships more easily, and cannot understand what all the fuss is about when people fall short.

These expectations and pressures cause one wound to multiply into two – the first wound is the initial neglect and abuse, the second wound is the inability to live up to societal expectations. As a man this is exceptionally humiliating, as we are socialized to be proud and powerful creatures, strong and capable, rational and in control of our emotions. Such ambitions defy reality, that men are animals like any other. Nonetheless, the charade continues, the broken are left humiliated and enraged.

I have seen panel shows discussing broken masculinities, where enabled, entitled men gave advice to the tune of: ‘go shower, brush your teeth and socialize more’. For five minutes or more they spewed cliché after cliché, celebrating their own success and putting down others, self-righteous middle-American wanktards. These banal panellists were clearly people without significant mental turmoil, without inferiority complexes, without the deep psychological suffering which comes from alienation, abuse and humiliation. This makes their lame jokes an abuse of some of the most afflicted members of society, a demonstration of patriarchy at its worst. Powerful and enabled men who do not see the privilege which sustains them, men who are protected by civil society from the rage they help to create.

Broken masculinity is a real problem. This is not just a reflection on the inability for men to be ‘breadwinners’, a fallen pride of old. This is much deeper. This is about society’s denial of the black pit, the dark hole in the cellar, the demons spawned by seemingly innocent expectations. We live in a society where abusers are protected, where familial morality is afraid to speak of the abuse, neglect and trauma which happens in the home. Justice is not done, abuse is not answered for. The afflicted have no escape valve, they are pressed down and do not understand why, they must live in the constant shadow of their own inferiority, compared to people constantly flaunting their ‘wealth, freedom and happiness’. As the powerful patriarchal humiliator is protected by civil society, the rage is randomly unleashed in violence against those perceived as lesser, or turned upon the self leading to depression and suicide. Violence is rife is society, it is just hidden, a deep taboo.

It is a powder keg waiting to go off.

When the deep psychological wounding and isolation of men meets the misogyny of our culture, things start to get dangerous. I believe however that most dangerous is the psychological abyss, and that ideology and politics alone cannot triumph. I need only look at myself for a reminder that no amount of progressive politics and ‘enlightenment’ can make up for the sheer chaos of trauma and mental unwellness. The void is deeper in me than most people that I know, from this darkness it does not look like there is a way out of it (maybe this is the depression talking, maybe it is a truth I have live with for the rest of my life). I know intellectually what is right and just, being that moral person is extremely hard, the emotional turbulence keeps leaving me fucked.

I am a ghost, I do not truly exist. People see through me, ignore me. I have no fundamental being, no grounding or stability. I have no history, no future and a harsh present. I hear all these people talking about ‘egolessness’ through meditation – do they know what they are talking about? Do they also want to be dust on the inside, waiting to collapse into a deeper nothingness? I think they are just trying to escape their lives for a bit, I don’t think they want to be ghosts. Unloved I am made unlovable, I must have but I do not feel worthy of being given. I want to give, but no one wants what is given in desperation; my love is worth nothing. Disenfranchised, irrelevant, unstable, voiceless, sub-human – there is no advocacy for broken men, no real equivalent of feminism or black civil rights. Can one be formed without devolving into hatred, misogyny and patriarchy? Unable to cope in the free competition of society, unable to enjoy the freedom of material liberty, sexual liberation, freedom to forge an identity, constantly told I need to, that it is there for me – FUCK OFF. Every day is a searching for consolation, until the final day comes, then at last I can find peace.

There are no villains when broken men do fucked-up things to others, violence and carnage and callous taking of life. It is a tragedy every time, the deeply hurt being abandoned by something even more callous; white, middle-class, capitalist, patriarchal society, with no recourse but the ultimate self-destruction. By the time he pulls the trigger there is nothing left of him.

Why?

Why were my childhood years destroyed by two abusive guardians?

Why do I have to deal with regular self-esteem collapse?

Why do I have to shut down and monitor suicidal thoughts all the time?

Why do I have to endure a life void of love or romance?

Why is who I happen to be seen as less valuable than others by a racist ideology? 

Why does morality protect the people who are guilty, but not the innocent?

Why do I have to relive traumatic episodes?

Why do I have to live with insomnia and chronic lack of energy?

Why do I have to cope with alienation from society?

Why do I have to live with the rejection that follows all of this?

Clearly the world is not balanced, and certainly not fair. There are some people for whom none of the above questions are ever asked. And some even more unfortunate people for whom life is worse.

There must be some kind of regulatory principle to account for this, to balance people’s stories. We cannot just leave society laissez faire and expect any kind of meritocracy to be established.  Leaving things be means perpetuating an ever worsening inequality of opportunity.

Some people start with an immense view of the world from the top of a hill, others start in a gutter filled with immense hurdles. Whether people succeed or fuck up is ultimately up to them, but how much harder is is to be something if you are emotionally crippled, living in constant poverty and fear of destitution, drained and trapped in your own body by extreme and disturbing emotion.

I do not want all of the shit that happened to me to stop me from reaching a place of thriving. I want support to flourish in spite of it. Society either needs to give more support and balance the books, or something will snap in all the people like me, and the outcome will force the issue.

The inhospitable hell-heat

I thought I would write something for posterity, something to look back upon and think – yeah its a cold, dark and damp Winter, but at least that shitty summer is over!

This heat is hostile to life. Grass withered and died in London parks, starved of resurrecting rain. The earth cracked apart as if beneath the tread of scorching giants, broken and hurt by the merciless pounding rays of heat.

Its climate change, and its not so much on our doorstep as permeating through our houses and into our bodies.

Now look at all the people rushing around outside your window. Look at all the people driving to and from work, running on the capitalist treadmill.

Today I feel glad I did not work for this system, and vow that I never will. This is man-made climate change, this scorching hell is our own doing. It is not particularly the fault of those individuals running around; they are just doing something rather than nothing. The fault lies with the system of short-termism, wealth inequality, separation from nature, the war machine, and you know the rest. Driving us on and on to our collective demise as a civilization.

Lets look at it another way – we are not only heading for catastrophe, we are suffering now.

And this is a ‘first world’ country. This is the height of civilization. Jokes about Britons coping with the heat aside, this is a precursor of the ‘fuckedness’ we are approaching.

Even in the richest and most ‘advanced’ societies people are dying from the heat. Sweden is aflame with wild-fires! Our one and only world, made a tinder box.

Who could want this? Who could deny that this is a horrible thing to experience?

It is laid bare for us, as much as we are made bare for it.

Yesterday I was actually a bit proud that I spent much of my life doing fuck all for this system. It was destructive to do nothing, and I will not lionize doing fuck all with yourself; the resisters and dissidents and people actively searching for solutions deserve our pride.

But at least I am significantly less responsible for the climate catastrophe then others, despite all their insults and ‘encouragements’ all these years. They were wrong for being conform-a-trons, and their sizzling flesh and agonizing tube journey home from work is but truth of it! Hoorah for me – now we can all slowly die in this hell-heat!

I promise never to wish for sunlight again! Whatever is, I will try to cope with it. Balance is the ultimate good.

Now lets do what we can to turn down the heat on this world folks, before it is fucked beyond repair.

The need for Exorcism

I often hear ‘we are all one, we are all connected‘ as some kind of optimistic mantra. I believe it to be true, it is the fundamental truth of the cosmos. But it is not exactly optimistic.

If we are all connected, then what I am is partly what my culture is. I have no choice in the matter; what is out there is in here. It is quite evident to me, one who has always been an outcast, a ‘failure’ and even an exile from society that things out there are unhealthy, dangerous and stained with generations of evil. But we are all connected – those things that I oppose are absorbed into me.

The values of an abusive family, of hierarchy and entitlement, violent masculinity and battered femininity – I don’t want it engrained in me, but here it is thirty years on. The values of a shallow, materialistic, sex-obsessed culture which prizes competition and possession over the continued existence of life on earth – it is shallow and vapid but I judge and loathe myself according to its shitty values. Even on a smaller scale the pathetic contest of friends or acquaintances for social power and acceptance – I feel like I need to somehow be involved, and that such things are right. But I know these things are wrong and horrid, but they are not mine to choose. They are there inside, lurking like demons. Even a stone can absorb what it is surrounded by, so imagine how vulnerable we creatures of flesh are.

This is why self-knowledge is so essential; if we can find where something comes from, we can achieve some awareness of it and reduce its power. But I do not believe we can achieve much alone, nor even with the help of an enlightened witness or therapist. It is a cultural exorcism that is needed – the worst values of humanity need to be extracted from us and scorched in cleansing flame. We do not need the mass-violence and mass-death that is awaiting us, we just need to be cleansed on the inside, such that the worst demons no longer even register as a possibility, or at least are so reduced as to be impotent.

This is not about inciting guilt in certain categories of people. It is about the ends – getting rid of all this fucking shit, and exorcizing it into the flames of history.

At this stage of my life, I do not believe we can ever be truly free from evil, we will always be scarred by the past; haunted by dreams, bad memories and associations. I may live out my years broken with no real chance of salvation, no matter what I try to do – I just do not know. Yet what we can do for certain is cleanse society of evil for the next generation – they are the ones who have a chance of true freedom. This is not to say we should live only for them and neglect ourselves. It is to say that we have the power to give them much better lives than we had, and this should be one of our first priorities.

Our all being connected is not, of course, a negative thing. It is our reason for being and its realization the only way to divert the capitalist leviathan from its destructive onslaught of nature. Being connected also means feeling the love and joy of others, the satisfaction and comfort, and our being open and sensitive to others is ultimately worth it. I merely wish to expound upon how vulnerable we are to what we do not believe in.

The self is much deeper than what you say you are.