You know I think this is what it all comes down to - love and hate - that simple - the two driving forces of humanity - one can save us, the other can destroy us - and if there is enough of one to at least balance out the other that is our only hope. If you look at it like good vs. evil than it is kind of like Star Wars - and all the other movies that go into the subject of the respective battle between the two. I think both love and hate are natural emotions, and I try to stay away from the notion that one emotion is good and the other is not, because obviously they both exist and are a natural product of our minds. Maybe even to a degree if I look at hate as something natural and inevitable, than I am going to be more accepting of it and I won't hate myself for hating - as there are enough reasons I can find to hate myself as it is. I know for myself that has been my own individual battle. I had so much hate within myself growing up - and was brought up in an environment where my two parents hated themselves for their own reasons, and unfortunately because they were so emotionally disconnected - they didn't even seem to know it or realize it, and their children around them became the targets of all of this. You can see that each and every one of us inherited this self hate as a result, and that it has affected us all in different ways.
The battle between love and hate starts on the inside of an individual, and then ultimately manifests itself collectively. I believe hatred and self-hatred are one and the same. If you feel at peace with yourself, and love is the principal force in your heart, it is difficult to hate anyone or anything regardless of the circumstances. I can almost see why some might hate someone who has hurt or harmed them or a loved one - to feel hatred and revenge for someone who has raped or killed a family member. Even then I believe that to feel that hatred - even if seemingly justified, is more destructive than helpful. But what about those who hate someone who has a different skin color, ethnic creed, or religion - how do you explain genocide, murder, aggression to begin with? I think it is all projected self-hate.
I know self-hatred first hand. It was like a poison that took hold of me from an early age, but I didn't even know it was there. I knew I had trouble with certain things. Asking out a girl, even if I knew she liked me - was like paralysis - I couldn't move, I couldn't do it - even though regrettably I now believe it would have been a pleasurable experience that gave me some more confidence - because at the time I didn't like myself enough to go through with the risk, and I think deep down - even if the flirting, staring, blatant clues were there that she liked me - I just couldn't do it. I will never forget a girl named Tracy in my sophomore PE class - I knew as plain as day she had it for me - she was a nice girl, she was kind of cute - okay - maybe not a genius or a deep thinker, but it would have been good for me to date her and see what happened. I just couldn't go through with asking her out - and then what followed after that - inevitably - was my first conscious exposure to self-hatred - because I hated myself for not having the confidence to begin with - even though looking back on it now - I had no control over it and no tools to deal with it. There were two tragedies - the first was the chance for an experience with an attractive woman that I never got to live out - but if that was not bad enough, the bigger tragedy was blaming myself for my own learned inadequacies.
How do you even address an issue like this, when the family environment you are living in - sharing your same disease, denies it is there, denies their own self-hatred and hatred of you as a result, and just act like everything is normal in an insane assylum where it is hard to tell who is the doctor and who is the patient - who is the one in charge - who is the parent, and who is the child.
My pattern with women continued. I became completely obsessed with a college girl named Christina who had flirted with me in the end of my freshman year - it was an innocent flirt - but even so an invitation that I allowed to consume me and sink into my head until it was an obsession out of control because I could not get past that first initiation point. Who knows if anything would ever have even come of it, but I never even allowed it to get to that point and then I sat there blaming myself for not being able to take care of my own desperate need to be loved. I knew this need consumed me - obviously after years of growing up in an environment of spiritual emptiness and self-loathing I was starved for it, but here were fleeting invitations to possibly satisfy some of this thirst and I could not make it happen. The more I was starved, the hungrier and more desperate I became, the more I built it up into an impossible obstacle, and the more I hated myself for my own self-imposed starvation. Of course by this time, I was setting myself up for such an overwhelming task that I think even if I had found the confidence to ask her out it would have been doomed to failure. I really believe that this love starvation was what threw me into my depressions in my college years. I found brief refuge in getting high, but I realized that was harmful and in trying to give up my one form of medicine, that probably was the last straw in sending me into the plunging depths of depression.
Depression is hell - and spending two consecutive bouts of it at my parents house was probably without a doubt the worst experience I have ever had. If there is one memory that stands out - even more so than dragging the razor blade against my wrists in the hope that somehow I would bleed to death and just get it all over with - it was a memory of standing in front of my mirror and absolutely feeling the strongest loathing for the person who was looking back at me. I absolutley despised this person I was staring back at and blamed him for falling apart and having to live in the empty hell of my bleak parent's house. I blamed him for not finding love, for ending up in this hellish situation, for not making it at school, for not having a future, for not being able to survive in a competitive world, for not having what it took to do anything - and it was quite natural I hated myself for all these things enough to want to do myself in, because I really believed all of these things. It is hard to believe there is anything positive that comes from feeling this - but the one positive I see in looking back at this was that all this came to the surface. Sure if I had known anything about the blood supply in the wrists I could have succeeded in my attempt, but I didn't even know how angry I was, how much I hated myself - I thought in some strange way everything was okay up to this point because it was all that I knew.
So - somehow I have gotten from there to here - I am not exactly sure how - and that person staring back at me in hate is not a person who has gone away yet - but he is no longer in charge of me either. I see him trying to creep back from time to time, and I know he is still there. Sometimes on a particularly dark night, I hear him trying to tell me just to end it all - that it is too much - the bills, the responsibility - that I am not cut out for it. Yet he has been revealed and he is no longer the one completely in charge now.
Anything in life worth achieving involves practice of some sort. I may not be a technical guitar wizard, but I spent a lot of time learning to learn the part I wanted to - to pick a certain way, learn the scales, figure out how to write songs - and my love of music has brought me to where I am. I have realized that music and expression not only brings a lot of the hidden darkness to the surface, but it also can be a way of meditating on love, fulfillment, self-confidence, and believing in one's self. Although I have now experienced the joys of physical fulfillment with another female, I also know that it is fleeting and you can't count on it. You can't count on anyone being by your side, being in the same mood you are in on a passionate level, you can't depend on anyone else to reassure you that you are desirable, attractive, or have value. But through repeating these thoughts to yourself, in song, while you are getting ready to sleep, or in the middle of the night between hours of sleep, you can program yourself to start to believe it.
This has been my mission in life - to continue to meditate on love, self-love, acceptance, faith, and belief in a higher power that somehow or another is looking after me and protecting me. I believe these things, I sing about them when the sun is setting, I see that the real purpose of my job - besides paying the bills and feeding the family and dogs - is to bring my human presence to others going through a difficult time to try to make it better for them. I was even able to cheer up a woman in my office who had been told off by another, telling her not to take it personal - to believe in herself and not let the other person's problems become hers - and she later thanked me for it. I know it is often redundant to say these things over and over to myself, but I can't take my eye off the ball.
Ironically when I fell in love on line almost 3 years ago, once the ashes scattered it taught me that I could feel a passionate type of romance with a being not physically present - and I still interact with this presence, even though the being who was participating with me at the time has since moved on and found her own real life love. That presence can be there - you can be in love without straying from your home or surroundings - as I once wrote about in a song with the chorus "I once called her Cathy, once called her Renee but she never has gone left or went away" - these are names of the first and last female presence I had fallen in love with, but even if you can't see, feel or hear these people any more, you can still tap into that presence and feeling of being in love. It is a world of imagination, and maybe only as real as it needs to be, but real in its own way and I still feel like I am in love, but it is no longer with any one female human being - it is more with my own Jungian anima that was ultimately the being I was chasing all along. In bringing back in what was once projected out, that is what I mean by the last line of the chorus "she lives in my heart now I'm just bringing her right back home".
This isn't a happily ever after story - this is ongoing. The winter comes and it is more difficult to access, there is still a well of grief, hurt and anger that continues to live on. But unlike the man I was about 20 years ago, I now have the medicine to counter it. The medicine is love - and my battle is the battle we all face - on the individual and collective level.
As my new musical lyrical guru, Michael Franti - ever so accurately put it:
"Love like your life depends on it, because it does"
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