Chapter 21: Crisis With Me

This chapter, I want to be a bit of a break from the sequence of events. In the last chapter, I had just graduated from Basic… well… that’s boring to a lot of people. They think “Oh, I never had an interest in the military, I’m not a WWII nerd like Onision over here, so, I’m checking out.” And you know, I get that. I lost hate your stupid obsession with cooking shows. *laughs* Kidding, I love “Kitchen Nightmares” so I’m not one to talk. But this chapter is about less about the previous chapter trends, and more about the mind behind those chapters… I’ve reached a point of relaxation, that left me really wanting to apologize. For years now, I’ve been a different person. I’ve been so completely consumed by stuff going on in my life that I literally forgot who I am. I got out of my beautiful little world and was pulled into another, much more futile world of hopelessness. Obviously the new, dark world, was one that I never really wanted a part of. This forfeit of my own dream caused me huge financial, emotional & mental losses… meaning I literally lost money, slipped into an even deeper depression & found my thoughts stuck in a circular, endless loop of misery. Being in this state… it’s like letting a stupid moron take the wheel of your car, and drive you wherever the stupid moron wants to go. You’re just sitting there, now shotgun, moaning about how unfair it is, when you’re the one who handed the controls over. Time for a reality check, time to take the wheel back. First, I need to address the elephant in the room, and that is myself. I’m apologizing to, myself. I screwed up so bad (talking to myself here) and I really let you down (me). I don’t give you enough credit, I don’t give you enough respect and I let the outside world ruin you. For so long I put your heart on your sleeve for anyone to take a shot at, and it was so unfair of me. I forgot about you, and let everything else consume all my energy to the point where I couldn’t even see you anymore, and for that (again, still talking to myself) I’m sorry. I hope one day you can forgive me. In response to myself? I forgive you, goofball, I love you. You gave me a chance to be me, to tell my jokes and you didn’t filter me. What you did is powerful and amazing. I owe you, and you shouldn’t feel so bad, everyone fucks up. If I had to guess, I’d say you fuck up less than average, and being just a person, that’s great. Consider yourself lucky. Now to talk to all of you. You’re my friends… well, some of you are. I know there are a lot of critics (at least one, lol) that read my stuff, and sit there, all, bickering to themselves and such… but most of you are my fans/supporters. If we’re being quite literal, for people who enjoyed my content for free and never gave anything back, I’m not sure I can say I owe you anything… but there are people I do owe. To the people who have had to sacrifice their time, energy or even more… their support through nice words, money or other things of actual substance, I do owe you my apologies for not being better. I have let you down like I let myself down. You gave me your vocal support, your funding or god knows what else, and I’ve just been sitting around, bitching. For years I’ve been… just bitching about my problems. The problems were never really that big of problems because I always did what I thought was best. I did what I felt was fair to me, the people in my life and I followed the general rules. In the grand scheme of things, if you’re on the side of reality/truth, good/bad shit will catch up with everyone, and often times, you best just let it run it’s course. I would apologize to other people in this message, but they are people in my personal life and that is not for public consumption. It would be shitty to apologize to some people in my life, knowing they’ll never read this or even know of my apology. The indirectness is pretty lame too. The point is, I had an epiphany moments ago, and that epiphany was what I have recently been subjecting myself to. This is where all of you who downloaded this book illegally get more free help, and life-advice that comes from real, horribly painful experience. Lucky you, wish I had this advice… The life-advice is: What you surround yourself with, you become. The only reason I’ve come to apologize to myself, and truly understand, not just see, but understand the error of my way, is because over the last few weeks I’ve been dedicating myself to the progress of my character. What really influenced this realization was the constant and focused reflection on the music videos and literature I’ve created in the past. Apologies don’t have a powerful effect all by themselves do they? Not if you have the history with hearing apologies like I do… or even the memories of making them. Experience is the ultimate teacher. If you want to find the majority of skeptics, you’ll also probably find the majority of senior citizens. With apologies for many folks, one day you may feel bad for a certain behavior only to repeat it later. So what good does that do? I have a long history of saying “Today is the day my whole life changes” only to find myself right in the middle of the same behaviors I took part in before. I was talking to my mom the other day and it became pretty clear rather quickly that my attitudes toward life are common and unremarkable. This is great news as it takes the pressure off me. It’s kind of like a mass suicide vs a suicide by yourself… there’s just less pressure, even though that is probably one of the worst examples ever. You know me, ridiculous. To get back on point… my wondering around in existence, trying to find purpose or direction… to many this process if everlasting. Every other person seems to have experienced an existential crisis… every other person seems to have a life messier than mine too. We make mistakes, we feel bad about them, then we try to do better in the future. Despite all the years of school, we are taught very little in self-discovery or how to become your best self. What do you expect from us? Some people never get better, other people do. Some people never grow, others do. But then there are the epiphanies, which revolve around my recent mindset. Epiphanies like “If you roll in the mud, you’re going to get dirty.” Meaning, if you talk to dramatic people, or chose to be dramatic, you’ll become tainted, you’ll find yourself consumed by the negative, and suffer like many others do. There are so many people who are unhappy, rarely want to be saved or cured. They are set in their ways and there is no changing them, so when they reach out for your hand, all they want to do is pull you down with them. Sometimes you will willfully engage with people who never took the chance to fix themselves. If you make the same mistakes they do, you’ll begin to justify your chaotic reality and even become just like the parasitic people that recruited you. If you don’t change, maybe you will be the misery that needs company. The reality is, we are as weak or as strong as we allow ourselves to be in many circumstances. A lot of that comes down to will or intelligence. Will is simply holding your ground with what you know is right. Intelligence, in this context, is understanding the best next move. Can you think your way through this issue? Or will you let yourself succumb to peer pressure and your immediate convenience? I recently heard someone saying that ADHD (a disorder which impacts your ability to focus on certain things) will cause some people who have it to not think very far into the future at any given moment. This lack in foresight causes people to react to the potential for stimulation or active stimulation with disregard for the consequences. Fortunately for me, I have never been diagnosed with this disorder. The description of ADHD does however tell me, I am better off with issuing sincere apologies than many. When I talk about being sorry for being stuck in a rut, and losing sight of the big picture, I want you to think about something: What happens when you walk in on your parents doing it? (I know, crazy example, but bare with me.) When you walk in on your parents, do you forever look at your parents differently? Do you also look at knocking before you enter a room differently? The answer is: Yes, of course you do. That is what I mean when I talk about an epiphany. That is what I mean when I say this apology, while easy to say, is different than others I’ve made in the past to myself and others. You don’t forget to knock on that door anymore, you don’t look at your parents the same ever again and in my case, you don’t forget what happened when you were pulled in the mud. You don’t forget how much it sucked to be down there, drowning in it while watching your future fade away. A lot of us lose the opportunity to be ourselves, to live our dreams or remain true to ourselves… we forget to listen to ourselves and most importantly, love the person we are deep down. What did I want to become when I was a child? What was my personality growing up? What do I want to be now that I am an adult? How do I want to live my life? What is fair to me? What do I owe others and what would I want from others? These questions go unasked for many of us and as a result we wind up becoming a stranger to ourselves. Sometimes I hear people talking, and it seems like they let go of their dreams a long time ago. Whatever creative outlet they used to have, gone. Whatever ambitions they had, dead. Why? Because they never changed. They never made a plan, and they never fought to keep the image of their desired future in focus.

This chapter was about letting myself down in the past, and my drive to do better in the future. This chapter was about my new marriage with the point of my existence. Till death do us part. Enough crying, let’s get back to the dream.