Life Lessons

A little while ago, Jarbles did a video on her birthday, the second in her now annual “lessons” series in which she describes as many life lessons she has learned as years lived so far. I really liked the idea, and decided to do one for my upcoming birthday. Since I turned thirty-mumble a few days ago I thought I would share thirty-hmnhrmnim lessons I have learned over the course of my life, in typical long-winded Founder fashion.

As with all my blog posts, this may and probably will be edited in future with new content. In fact, given the subject matter, I can see myself adding a new life-lesson every year this blog remains clinging to my humble corner of the internet, so feel free to check back in 12 months or so to see me summarize everything I learned that year with another bit of fortune cookie gibberish. This could well be a life-long project.

So with that, enjoy/I apologize.

1.       Know yourself.

This is my most important lesson. The first lesson I learned in life, and something I consider a lifelong rule. I first saw it emblazoned upon the walls of a classroom in my school in the form of a Shakespearean quote: “This above all, to thine ownself be true”. Because what’s the point in doing anything if you’re not being true to yourself at the same time? It made sense to me on a deep, almost spiritual level.

But to be true to yourself, you must know yourself, and that is far more important. It’s also an unending task. You must explore yourself as you explore this world, including all the new corridors that form out of those experiences. There is a power that can’t be explained in truly knowing yourself. Something that defies words. A sense of perfect order, like looking down upon a completed jigsaw puzzle and comprehending that every piece is in its place.

Knowing your place in the universe, knowing exactly what it is that should and does fill your footsteps makes it so that you can truly claim your body and your life as your own. You are a being of indescribable complexity and inexplicable specificity. You are unique. Like a god. Like a force of nature. There’s only one of you, and only ever COULD BE one of you, and that uniqueness is indestructible, and it’s yours­. Knowing that creature is to know the things that only that creature could ever do. Knowing that power lets you harness it.

It is important to know many things, to always keep learning and bettering yourself. But all other things are learned by and filtered through the self. Everything starts there. Knowing yourself is like securing the platform that holds up all of the knowledge in the world, and mastering its use. After all, if you don’t know yourself, what’s the point in knowing anything else to begin with? Who’s learning it? Or is that knowledge merely its own master?

2.       A person is defined above all else by their principles.

It’s easy to label yourself a good person, or a rationalist, or a healer or leader or anything else. Walking the walk is a different story. To be the best that you can be, you need more than just idealism. You need to be able to enforce your own self-actualization. You’re not defined by what you do; otherwise we would all just be bags of mistakes. You’re defined by what you keep doing­. Whether or not you learn from your mistakes, whether or not you are improving as a person. That’s what counts.

As an intelligent being is it incumbent on you to think. Think about everything. Ponder on matters ethical and moral, philosophical and scientific, spiritual and mundane. Learn what your positions are on various different matters, and whether those positions are sound. Establish the parameters of your being, and then stick with them. Even when it’s hard, even when facing adversity.  So long as the best information you have access to is telling you which path is the right one, be true to those principles.

Knowledge starts within, but change starts with what kinds of rules you are willing to live by. I have mine, many are in this list. I follow them even when I don’t understand them, because I trust the judgement of the person I was when I made them, and I understand that as people we are prone to moments of fallibility, anger, cruelty, neglect and many other harmful behaviours. You’re only a good person if you can continue to act as such even when under the influence of such negative feelings.

For example, I won’t kick a man when he’s down, even if in the haze of the moment I really want to. Why? Because principles make the man, and if you only follow your principles when it’s easy, they’re not really principles, are they? Could there be any true honour in such a person? And what about you? If you could break yourself down into a series of statements, what would they say about you? Is that the person you want to be? Is there anything missing from that figure?

Find out what kind of person you are, and if there’s anything in that person you don’t like, work on it. Become someone who is proud to be defined by the principles by which they live their life. Which leads me to my next lesson…

3.       It is possible to change yourself.

NOT EASY. But possible. Habits can be broken just as they were learned, new habits can be forged from the stuff of the old. You can bend your personality into a better shape. But it takes time and work.

I don’t recommend you do it the way I did, but I am proof that it can be done. What I did is to pull on every thread in my conscious mind and untangle my entire sense of self. Unsatisfied with the way I was, I sought to deconstruct myself, and rebuild myself in a better image. I borrowed personality traits from all over. The best people I knew, the ones I admire. I introduced behaviours and inflections, improved ways of thinking, changed my accent, I even added personality flaws. I took the broken eggs life had given me and worked to bake them into a cake.

Personally, I would recommend a more incremental approach. What we think of as self is really more like a big, complicated computer program. And each line of code is really just a different habit. We are smorgasbords of habits. Rituals, routines, repeated actions, we learn to navigate this world by building a series of pre-programmed behaviours into ourselves, so everything we encounter isn’t always like the first time we encountered it. We have this recorded response to fall back on. Habits are incredibly easy to form, but almost impossible to break.

But if you learn to read the base code of yourself, you can bypass that by overwriting old habits with new ones. Practising new behaviours until pretence becomes persona. Some things can’t be undone. Some things are just hard limits imposed on you by genetics and circumstance, but even those things you can’t control – you can learn to control HOW you choose to respond to them.  Turning every negative into a positive is just a question of perspective. Skills can be learned, attitudes adjusted. The only true obstacle you have is how motivated you are to change – and believe me, I understand that motivation is a very REAL obstacle.

But it is possible. Everything you want to be IS possible. Why? Because…

4.       Human beings are infinitely capable.

What do I mean by this? I mean that people can do almost anything they set their mind to given time and effort. That's the human superpower, and if you stop to think about it, it's goddamned amazing. Every time you see someone performing some amazing skill on TV and think to yourself “man, I wish I could do that”, what’s really happening there is someone who never tried something is watching someone else who DID. The fact that other people can do those things doesn’t prove that they are better than you; it proves that PEOPLE can do those things. And here’s the important thing. You are a people. Realise that. Don’t assign limits to yourself.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that things like age, disability or illness are not legitimate limiting factors; of course they are. All I’m trying to say is… don’t undersell yourself. Whatever obstacles you do have in life, never let them be your defining factor. If you can’t do one thing, you can do INFINITE other things. The number of things that are truly walled off from you, that you are utterly incapable of achieving is far, far smaller than the endless list of unexplored options you may be right for. There are SO many things we assume we could never do; until we try.

I know that at least someone reading this is saying to themselves, right now, “that’s easy for you to say”, you’re saying “you don’t understand, I CAN’T”. And you’re wrong that I don’t understand. Asking you to try does not mean I am trivializing how difficult it is, or even how impossible it seems. Look, unless you know me well you won’t understand just how sincere I am in saying this, or that I am not merely paying lip service to my own point, but believe me, I am just the worst. I speak from no privilege, with no presumption, and with absolutely no advantage. I have, when in the darkest pits of my own self-loathing and despondence, discovered within myself, at times, an amazing well of strength I didn’t know was there.

If I can do that, ANYONE can. Literally fucking anyone. It’s not like tapping into a waterpipe, you can’t just unload a torrent of free willpower by thinking nice thoughts. But you are SO much capable than you know, and if you think your struggles stand in testimony against this, think again. Think instead about how much strength you needed just go get through those times? Sometimes the superpower a person has works round the clock just to keep them looking normal, like if the Hulk had to drag a moon everywhere he went. He would be too tired to do anything else, but he still is that strong. And so are you. You have that power, and you can discover new ways to harness it.

Try, my friends. Try. You may surprise yourself. And if you feel compelled to tell me that you could NEVER be as good as those truly great people you admire?

5.       Fuck modesty.

Modesty is one of my biggest pet peeves, so I’m about to open a big ol’ can of fuck this all over your face. What is modesty? It is the socially engineered expectation of pretending to be ashamed of your own accomplishments. No, it is not humility. Humility and modesty are totally different things­. Now, look, what I just said is sketchy, and I did consult a dictionary to be sure. It turns out that the definition of humility DOES mention the word modest. But here’s the thing, the definition of MODEST is about five paragraphs longer – and all that extra baggage is my point.

Humility is a kind of dignity in strife. A form of remaining grounded to reality and not allowing your pride to run away with itself. Modesty, however, is an extreme. Modesty tells us that we should never laud our own accomplishments. That we should trivialize and play down everything we do well. That enjoying any aspect of yourself is ARROGANT or EGOTISTCAL. Well FUCK THAT. No it isn’t. This is a form of the social bullying virus I have written about here in the past. People who react to someone else being pleased with themselves about something with vicious words like egotistical neither understand that word’s meaning nor what they are really reacting to.

Here’s the real issue. Being a social species, we are compelled to a certain democratic standard of behaviour. Voices in unison form consensus, consensus dictates what is seen to be correct. This means that as a general rule, what everyone agrees on becomes the expected reality. Nobody likes being punched in the face; so face-punching isn’t allowed. You get the idea. But what everyone agrees on isn’t always a good or correct thing. There are many things we all share in common that are profoundly negative. For example, INSECURITY. People who are extremely self-conscious (read: EVERYONE) will feel resentment towards those who seem to be at peace with themselves, or even, gasp, shock, chagrin, CONFIDENT in themselves, even if but for a fleeting moment.

This negative response is EASY, and so it is COMMON. So common that we have constructed a social protocol in which people are unconsciously peer-pressured into expressing a self-deprecating sentiment against themselves at every possible opportunity, just to ward off the very IDEA that they are daring to believe in themselves. They are SO pressured into this mind-set that they literally feel SHAME if they don’t downplay their accomplishments. This is not healthy. This is not good. If how you conduct yourself is dictated for you by other people’s issues, you have an obligation to break the mould. Fuck modesty. Be proud of what you have actually accomplished.

6.       Always be honest.

This obviously sounds like a good rule in general, but it’s also the sort of banal, meaningless drivel you would expect to hear from every tofu-guzzling yoga instructor you’ve ever seen prancing about in crocs and a toga talking about how to harness positivity with homeopathic chakra realignment. It sounds just enlightened enough to be unobtainable and boring, while being unrealistically disconnected from the human condition. But here’s the thing; it’s NOT.

Being totally, 100% honest at all times is nowhere near as hard or as volatile as it sounds. Now I won’t lie to you and say it won’t get you into any drama or rub anyone the wrong way, but these are, after all, MY life lessons, not necessarily ones that will be good for you. But on the whole, at least among your true friends, it will spare you more drama than it will ever cause. People will come to learn that you don’t pussyfoot for their benefit around the facts which they inevitably have to face anyway. They will come to see that you always tell the truth, and so they can COUNT on you for that when the truth is what they really want.

If everyone always said exactly what they meant without waxing their words or obscuring their opinions with layers of socially-ingrained vagueness, the world would be a much better place. No more of the he said she said bullshit, no more two-facedness or putting on a false smile when what people really need to see is a raised eyebrow. Honesty isn’t just a tool of the sickeningly righteous; it’s a tool for the pragmatists. It solves more problems than it could ever create, and it leads us more directly to where we want to go without diverting in a wide birth around other people’s delicate egos.

7.       Stop caring about what other people think.

This is something you will be told again and again throughout your life, and probably have been many times already – but it doesn’t matter, because you’ve never really listened to it, and never will. You will not really assimilate this perspective until you reach your own, personal “ahah” moment and realise what it actually means. There is an elective club of “don’t give a fucks” that roam this world undetected by anyone else, with such a lightness to their movements that we can almost single one another out from a crowd. People who hit rock bottom hard enough to break through the other side and there discovered the punchline to life’s sordid joke.

It sounds trite and simplistic, but it’s true. It sounds like what everyone says to their friends during hard times, but no one ever really embraces it until they have no other choice. And when they do, they find a kind of liberation that can’t really be put into words. To have all of your social anxieties and baggage boiled away until all that is left is this tiny morsel of a being, the real, unsullied you. Beset from the junk. The thing you thought had rotted away under all the mounds of garbage and deep wounds to your soul. But you’ll find it. You’ll realise that you legitimately can NOT care about what other people think of you, and hold your head high where once you slinked, cringingly around unlit street corners.

I can’t stress this enough. I know you’ve heard people say it a million times. But it is OBTAINABLE. All of your confidence and insecurities are tied to this mirror you have trained to your face at all times, displaying a twisted version of yourself that you imagine others see, until you are so self-conscious that you can hardly remember how to walk. But you can, and one day will, toss that mirror aside and march boldly through the crowds without the slightest of cares. I’m not saying not to LISTEN to people, but you don’t have to invest your own self-worth in what they say. I just wish people didn’t have to get psychologically broken before they figure this out, as so often seems to be the case.

8.       Never make assumptions.

This is a rule that has served me well. Conjecture can be useful, but if you proceed with anything on the assumption that things ARE a certain way, without any evidence, you’re almost always going to find that assumption backfire in your face; especially if you have my luck. The truth is this is a major problem with society. People have become so coddled that they don’t understand the difference between fact and opinion anymore. They feel entitled to their ignorance, almost like it's some sort of religious right. They get their opinions from angry people on TV and have lost all capacity to care about fact-checking - and when you confront them about this, THEY feel oppressed.

The only reason to fear reason is when you know the truth is likely not on your side. This isn't something to try to protect yourself from, it's something to embrace. I don't know is an acceptable answer, and it's the reason for you to go looking for the truth. Don't make the mistake of filling in the gaps in your knowledge with fantasies about how you would prefer things be, and then start defending their existence as if arguing with reality might change it. This is nothing less than the worship of ignorance. If you treasure your beliefs more than the truth, more than how you WANT things to be, you have sacrificed your credibility upon the altar of mental weakness. 

Truth should be your ALLY, not your enemy. Life works better when you are INFORMED. When you come into a situation knowing what to expect and how to handle it. The best way to achieve this is to get out of your own way. Have your first impressions, by all means, just shelve them afterwards until they become relevant and focus on the facts that you KNOW before making any decisions. If something seems obvious, that’s the greatest reason to reconsider your opinion. The more certain you are, the more closed off you are to other options. Those options potentially represent the things you don't know, and regardless of your pride, there will always be a vast order of magnitude more things you don't know than those you do. 

9.       See the best in people, not just the worst.

This isn’t easy to do, especially in a world this flawed. Sometimes it seems like there are more idiots than rational people. More bigots and hateful minds that those in search of peace and harmony. But I think it’s more the case that every person is a spectrum unto themselves.

It would be foolishness to deny the animal within. We all have one. A beast, buried in the deepest recesses of our consciousness, under layers of social repression and obligation. It comes out in us during weak moments, those venomous words you spit at those you love when stressed to your limits, those moments you went for the jugular, and don’t really know why. Every drop of anger or hate you have ever felt, however little that may be, condenses somewhere in your psyche and feeds this beast, and I think to be truly enlightened we must acknowledge and control it, rather than deny its existence.

Some people have less control over that compulsion for cruelty, and since human beings are prone to irrationality, their beasts will creep out in the cracks of their personality, latching onto subcommunities, ideologies, certain types of people or practises. The very notion of righteous anger is inherently contradictory, because while sometimes anger is an understandable response, it’s still just an outlet for that beast. It’s just a situation in which we have social permission to be cruel and hateful, and we relish those excuses. This dark side of humanity is something we must be aware of, lest we allow it to control us.

Why are there so MANY instances of hate and negativity? Because we are ALL flawed people, and different people have those flaws in different parts of their personality. That doesn’t mean that any of those people are just bad to the bone. Yes, it is very depressing that so many are so quick to cruelty, but consider this. With very few exceptions, an act of love is what brought us all into the world. And the human larval form being so pathetic, it took several more months of dedicated love to raise us from tiny, hungry, screaming demons that anyone with an ounce of sense would throw out the window into something that could at least conceivably take care of itself.

That’s why no matter how much of a cynic I can be at times, I never quite give up on humanity. Because look at us. Look at US. Several billion testimonies to the intrinsic good of mankind. Billions of souls raised at the teat of sacrifice and unconditional kindness. Aided by hormones and social obligations, sure, but at the same time… we all exist because someone gave up literally years of their live to wiping both our tears and our arses without hesitation, without condition, and without asking anything in return. People loved YOU enough to wait on you hand and foot, to defend you from all the harshness of the world for at LEAST a good number of years.

So it isn’t the case that the world is filled with mostly individuals who hate, and some who love. We are spectrums, existing across all frequencies of emotion. The world is filled entirely with people who love, and a great many who failed to reach than standard in at least one area of their lives. The truth is, we’re all just fallible. We’re all idiots. We just have dedicated areas of specialty for our stupidity. (That’s the part of me that is, in fact, still a cynic). But it won’t help you to focus only on the negative. Notice it, by all means, and attack it with all the strength you have, but draw that strength not only from yourself, but from the knowledge that an equal, if not far greater amount of love exists in the world, too.

THAT is what you’re fighting for.

10.   Other people’s lives are your business only to the extent that THEY affect YOU.

I’ve never been one to shy away from bringing other people to task when I think there is a problem with their belief system or their values. And I don’t always wait for an invitation to do so. I do consider it the duty of every thinking person to attack misinformation and disinformation, to challenge the faulty consensus, to cure social diseases with or without consent, and to tame the wild horses of other people’s imaginations. But one thing unites all of those concepts; ­harm.

If I think you are harming people, or by way of inaction or complacency, allowing harm to be forwarded through you, I will take that on. This is the true basis of morality. Some philosophers consider wellbeing to be the basis, but I respectfully disagree. If wellbeing sits at the heart of morality then we are obligated not only to prevent harm, but to create health; and while that is morally laudable, I do not believe we all have a duty to all make each other’s lives better, only to not make it worse. Anything more is a pleasant bonus, not an obligation.

So if you think someone else’s lifestyle is some form of attack on your moral sensibilities – ask yourself only this. In what way does it harm you? If two people of a combination of sexes, gender identities, skin colours, religious affiliations or anything else should couple, and you find that morally offensive – ask yourself if that’s REALLY morality? Because if you can’t identify the difference between YOUR personal preferences, and morality, that makes you a dangerous human being. Someone who walks around without any actual grasp on what morality is should be receiving medical attention, not preaching at other people.

And I don’t just say this because this is my soap box. I have to remind myself of this, too. It’s a conscious, and difficult decision to turn a blind eye to people spouting what I consider to be hateful messages about immigrants, flawed political ideas, to be in love with the idea of millions of people walking around with guns. These ideas sicken me. But I have to draw a line between ideas I consider to be bad, and the people who hold them. I will challenge bad ideas all day, but I’m not going to make it my mission to act like their personal preferences are actually injuring me. Even if it can sometimes feel that way.

11.   BE what you would ATTACK.

By this I mean, don’t just go after the things you think are wrong. Try to UNDERSTAND them. Try to BECOME them. Consider every viewpoint seriously, as if it was your OWN. BELIEVE it on a deep, personal level, and comprehend why others would rationalize it. Only then are you qualified to make any kind of statement about what is wrong with it. Only when you have successfully put your pride to one side and seriously considered the possibility that you might be the one who is in the wrong can you say you have earned your right to say it’s not so.

This isn’t easy. In fact, it’s borderline sociopathic when you really break it down. I’m saying you basically have to be able to jump into anyone’s head and really understand their point of view. Racists, homophobes, Nazis, scum of the earth. But everyone thinks they’re the good guy, and you can’t criticise anyone by just dismissing them as some sort of frothing deposit from the spillway of pure evil. In THEIR mind, they are in the right. And in order to challenge this, you have to be willing to really TRY to understand why they think that, even if the inevitable conclusion is simply that they are irrational or were raised that way.

I make a point of challenging myself to construct an argument defending everything I want to attack before doing so. Sometimes I even talk myself around, and come to see a point of view other than my own. This is a good thing. Correctness doesn’t start with you, so if you consider your own opinion to be the yardstick by which you can judge what is right or wrong, consider that everyone you disagree with is doing the same. For all you know, YOU’RE the Nazi, and you just never got challenged by someone willing to help you see it. This is why we have to collaborate to refine our understanding of reality. Work together, not against each other. This is why we all must work to keep an open-mind.

12.   Know what you’re talking about

Everybody has an opinion on everything, but unfortunately facts don’t give a damn what your opinions are. I participate in debates quite often, as anyone who knows me can tell you. Those who can handle the debate with dignity and respectability generally find it to be a productive experience. I am known for ruthlessly pursuing the truth, regardless of what it might be, and I don’t waste time beating around the bush of other people’s shallow nerves. But I have my rules there just as I do in the rest of life, chief among which is that I don’t draw first blood, but I do not suffer the fools who do.

So naturally, among those who fail to match my standards in such debates, an inevitable onslaught of insults and accusations will usually follow. Often, they will include something like “you think you know everything”. Of course, the reality is, I don’t think that. But when you appear to know everything, the first conclusion of the weak-minded is that you appear that way to yourself as well. It’s sort of like how budgies can’t understand their own reflection in the mirror, people of this sort of simplicity lack sufficient theory of mind to imagine you having an opinion of yourself that is any different from their own impression of you.

But the impression itself, one which inspires such ire in those whose understanding of logic extends as far as “but Bill O’reily said…”, comes from the simple fact that I don’t express any opinions on things until I first know what I’m talking about. You see, it’s the easiest thing in the world to appear knowledgeable. You simply have to be knowledgeable.  If you prepare for a debate before having it by seriously considering every viewpoint and looking into every angle, you end up armed with an arsenal of retorts and responses to every possible challenge. The result is that, to their perspective, you seem to be some miraculous font of correctness that they just can’t defeat.

Of course, among your more rational peers, this will be less a source of resentment and more a mark of distinction. And this doesn’t have to be limited to debate. This is a general life principle. It’s better to know what you’re talking about before opening your mouth than to opine with impunity. There are so many times when you might unwittingly perpetuate a falsehood, or contribute to the virality of a dishonest meme or story by passing it on without fact-checking. These things have consequences. They contribute to cultural attitudes, and if such things could be traceable, you just might find you helped cause a pandemic that ruins lives.

13.   Use what you can do, to tackle what you can’t

You know, growing up I was far more timid and reclusive. I wouldn’t talk much because I couldn’t seem to find the words to say the things I wanted to say. I had difficulty expressing anything, so in the end I just said nothing. It wasn’t until late high school that I discovered I had an affinity for writing. I enjoyed it because it allowed me to take my time. To choose the perfect words. By holding open the speech bubble until I had hacked away at the dictionary and refined everything I wanted to say to a distilled form, I gradually increased my speaking vocabulary as well. I became more expressive, more confident.

When I found my words, I also sort of found my place in life. I realised that some problems can be tackled indirectly, by using what you have. What you’re good at. You might not even know you’re good at it yet, but it’s there. Your passion. Your creativity. Your ART. Waiting to be discovered. And when you find it, you can use it. Maybe not to pay the bills or to right all the wrongs in your life, but you can use it to express the things that can’t be expressed any other way. And you don’t have to do it for anyone else’s benefit other than your own. If you can’t do something you want to do – look at what you CAN do, and find a way to turn that into a window to the life you want.

14.   Turn your weaknesses into strengths

An extension to the previous life lesson. The point of this one is to say that even if you have barriers in the way of your progress, don’t always view them as obstructions. Sometimes, they can be an obstacle course, a playhouse to be tackled and defeated, or even a fulcrum by which you can gain leverage over your future.

If you’re ADD – harness your imagination and creativity. If you’re an insomniac, recognize that you are just too strong and vitalized to be held down. If your body is in pain, guess what? You have a superpower! No one can handle pain like you can. Misery grants empathy. Despondence teaches gratitude. You’re not limping, you just take your time. You see things clearly in the interim between steps. You’re not paralyzed, you’re an observer, like a sentient mountain that can watch the seasons pass in peace.

There is a perspective by which you can come to view the charge of every bad thing in your life as the potential energy for a good thing. Anything that makes you recoil in fear or revulsion is granting you an elastic boost against some other obstacle. Every blow taken is a blacksmith’s hammer forging you into something stronger, or the loading of emotional ammunition into an immensely powerful weapon. Take your weaknesses, and learn from them. Learn how to paint them onto your targets so that your life in chains has instead become a life of specialized training, making you better prepared than anyone for taking on this world from the specific vector that only you can use.

15.   Learn by doing.

Learning doesn’t come easy to everyone. I am one of those people. You could sit me down to a lecture explaining exactly how to do something, and for some reason it just won’t sink in. I can crack open a textbook and read it so many times I cold quote it verbatim and still not understand what it actually says. Some people are just like that, and to an extent I think we all are. But that’s okay. You don’t have to understand everything BEFORE you try to tackle it.

Take it from the guy who obsessively plans things to the smallest detail before starting everything. There comes a point where there’s only so much you can do in your head. You have to roll up your sleeves and get a feel for how it all fits together. Explore your tasks with your fingertips, come to know them like you know the streets you grew up in. If not comprehending, then at least recognition can be your guide. It’s only once you get down to the wires and coding that you can begin to see the patterns emerge.

Learning doesn’t come easy to me, but things don’t have to be easy to be possible. Sometimes you just have to find the path of least resistance, and sometimes, paradoxically, that involves going the long way around instead of getting stranded at square one. Get your hands dirty. Try to grapple with the things you don’t understand. There are no guarantees, but you’ll find that there are elements to everything that can’t be learned through standard studying methods. There is an emergence to reality that can only be absorbed through touch.

And when that fails?

16.   Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

It doesn’t make you look stupid not to know something. Everyone has a first time for learning everything, and it can’t all be crammed in during childhood. In fact, it is the willingness to learn which makes asking questions such a GOOD thing. It shows that you KNOW you are not yet done on your journey of self-improvement. There is wisdom in this humility (and yes, this is ACTUAL humility). Asking questions demonstrates that you are aware of what knowledge you lack, and you are actively working to improve it.

Anyone who might call you stupid for asking questions is criticising you for the exact issue you were in the process of correcting at the time, which is as stupid as laughing at an overweight person in the gym. It makes no sense to criticise someone for the problem they are literally fixing as you do it. The real stupid ones are those who have no questions to ask. They’re the ones who lack that curiosity, the innate human drive to become more than you are. That’s the best thing we have, and it should be cherished.

17.   Friends aren’t just the ones you would take a bullet for. They’re the ones who would take a bullet for YOU.

It’s easy to say you would bend the whole world for any of your friends. It’s quite another to know in your heart that the sentiment is not only true, but returned. If you should find yourself compiling a list of your friends and realise it is miles long, then in my opinion, you are not compiling a list of friends. Now it might very well be that I simply have a different standard of friendship, and my usage of this term does not map with yours. That’s fine. I am telling you MY definition of friendship. Because the truth is, in MY view, there is no real way to compile such a list and have those you call friends be in a different category to those you call family.

True friends should be just as beloved, and every bit as rare. In a way, that’s what makes them so precious. And if you don’t know such people yet? You will. Someday, you might even be betrayed by one of them, and foreswear the entire concept. It’s easy to do. And it’s hard to trust someone that much once, let alone multiple times. But the reality is we are not islands. At some point, you end up needing to put your trust in another, and that is not a sign of weakness. It’s a leap of faith. I hope you find people in your life who you know would catch you. Chances are… you do, even if you don’t know it yet. You won’t find them if you don’t remain open to the possibility.

18.   Live as though the world is as it ought to be.

Cynics are those who see what is wrong with the world but find it easier to become part of the problem than the solution. It is those who have been defeated by life who take refuge in cowardly sentiments like “you can’t change the system” or “people are just assholes”. They’re not. Because so long as we see what’s wrong in the world, we share something in common besides the easy way out. We share a drive to make things better. Giving up may be easier, but fighting is how you end the pain.

Don’t wait for social permission to take action. Don’t take a vote before standing up for what is right. If you can see what is wrong with the world, and you have ANY ability to affect it, do not let the cynicism of others paralyze you. If you’re not willing to live the way you think the world should work – you’re a hypocrite, but worse than that, your dreams are wasted on you. What’s the point in wanting for a better world if you won’t do your part to help it be that way? Maybe everyone is as good as you are deep down? Maybe if everyone who feels the way you do took action too, the world WOULD be that way?

That’s all the world really is. People making decisions. Choices that have consequences that ripple like a skimmed pond influencing everyone it comes into contact with. Don’t be the influenced – be the influencer. Compromise when you have no choice, sure. Be affected by others just as you want them to be affected by you. But don’t lose who you are.

19.   Savour every moment.

Or at least the important ones. I know this sounds boring and generic, like the scribbled sentiment of a hallmark card. But really think about what this means. Have you ever suffered a sickness, like a really painful sore throat? And as you sit there fixating on the pain and discomfort, you wish you could remember what it felt like to have a throat that isn’t sore? But because human beings live in the moment and the flavour of past events disappears so quickly, we find it hard to do that.

So do it now. Think about the things in your body that aren’t hurting. Think about the things in your life that are right. What it feels like to have an arm or a leg. The people you still have access to. The utilities you take for granted. Know them, and commit to memory, right now, what it feels like to not have a sore throat, or an upset stomach, or how it feels to have a phone at your fingertips, or to be able to call someone you love and tell them so.

Do this, not because when that bad day comes and you can’t access these things you will then be able to perfectly remember them. You won’t. The flavour of the moment will still be absent.  Do this instead so that when that day comes you won’t be spitting curses at yourself for NOT having taken the time to savour that experience. THAT’S the worst part. That’s where the “I wish I had just one more chance” comes from.

Feeling ill and wanting to remember what “well” feels like is frustrating, but even worse is wanting that, and knowing you never took the time to think about how it feels to be well in the first place. You see, one feels like a frustration that you couldn’t do anything about, but the other feels like a failure on your own part. You may find that you feel just a little bit better on those bad days from knowing that while you had access to the thing you love – you were keenly aware of it.

And if you think it’s too late for you to do this – stop. Change your perspective. Because you are focussing on what you CAN’T change, what you have already LOST. This is about taking inventory of what you have. What could you lose tomorrow that would make your life even worse? Think of those things or people, recognize them, appreciate them, cling to them. Know that you have more than just your pain in this life. This won’t only benefit you in the future, you may just find it benefits you right now.

20.   Expect the worst.

Have a plan for every worst case scenario you can think of, and extras for the ones you can’t. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been faced by an unexpected disaster and simply opened my “this specific disaster” box to handle it. I make a point of being prepared for every possible situation, and not just because I’m Batman (although I do have a plan to take down the Justice League should they ever go rogue). I do it because I’ve been blindsided far too often in life. Every time you count on someone else, or trust in the system not to fail you, that’s when everything goes wrong.

And it’s not just about having a plan; it’s about being mentally prepared. There have been times in your life when you have woken up to a nightmare. Whether it was an agonizing pain in immediate need of attention, the screams of a loved one in need or a crash of something breaking. We’ve all been thrown into those situations and had to cope with it on the fly. If I told you this would happen to you in five minutes, the stress of knowing it would eat you alive. Trying to prepare for something like this is like preparing to operate on yourself. Your own survival instincts compel you to reject it. That’s why it helps in the long run if you can begin constructing a “disaster mode”, a calm, rational mind-set which you can slip into when the worst happens. Because when it DOES happen, you don’t have the option of rejecting it.

To do this, sometimes a little more than practise alone is necessary.

21.   Take control of your emotions.

Take it from me, this isn’t easy. Growing up, I was a wild tempest of emotion. More often being taken along for a ride by them than just experiencing. At some point I just kind of overloaded my own circuits and burned them out. It took me a long time to relearn how to feel, so in a way, it’s like I’ve had two childhoods. This has shown me the power of emotion, and the danger of it. More than most people, I have a sense of how emotions should exist to serve your thinking mind, rather than outright taking control of it.

Your emotions are an important part of your nature, the very essence of your being. You would not be you without them. Your emotions help you to understand when something is wrong, or harmful. They keep you running when you need to run, and they keep you swinging when you have no other choice. Emotions are our first warning system against danger – but THEY ARE NOT THE DECISION MAKERS. They can cause you to overreact, or even to react based on wrong information. If someone feels off to you, for example, your feelings might compel you to judge them harshly, but your intellect can analyse that experience and realise that those emotions came from somewhere else.

Emotions present to you the problem, but it is up to your MIND to find the solution. Thought comes first. It has to, because your thoughts are what you are. Your emotions are just chemical reactions taking place in response to what happens around you. To react on emotion alone is to react by instinct, like an animal. It is to surrender your humanity, and all that makes you special and who you are. When your emotions call for you to panic or freak out, simply acknowledge the situation they are trying to alert to you to. Accept the message, and then put those feelings in a box while you take action with thought.

You don’t have to be ruled by your emotions, and you don’t have to supress them. Just find the right place for them, and keep them there. If you really find it so hard to control your emotions, just try analysing them before you react BASED on them. If you can’t find a rational justification for the response, allow yourself to consider the possibility that this emotion should not be in command of your vessel right now. People think that they can’t reason with their emotions, but they can. If anything, reason is what calms them. You only have to try. But I understand this is easier said than done.

22.   You cannot purchase redemption.

People think that owning up to their mistakes is synonymous with taking responsibility for them, and that conflation between responsibility and blame has had tremendous negative impacts on things like rape culture and legal accountability. It’s bullshit. An apology or an admission of fault is not a solution to any real problem, although it can’t hurt. What people don’t seem to understand is that mistakes or past sins are not erased by offering up some sort of sacrificial lamb. They say two wrongs don’t make a right, but what is actually meant by that phrase is that two NEGATIVES don’t make a POSITIVE.

You can’t just sit there and feel bad for what you’ve done and think that balances some cosmic ledger. You can’t try to self-flagellate your way out of the consequences of your actions. They have to be braved. There’s no watchful eye in the sky who can take away your debts, the only way to truly take responsibility is to ACCEPT what you have done wrong, and work to actively CHANGE yourself for the better. Doing right by the person you wronged is a damn good start, but it’s not a way of resetting the scales, and if you’re doing it for that reason then you’re ultimately just acting out of selfishness. You shouldn’t need an incentive to take care of someone you wronged. It should be a natural response.

I’ve seen so many people think they can bargain their way out of the consequences of a situation they helped create, but no, it doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t matter if your guilt is sincere or false, if you act out of compassion or rationale. If what you’re trying to do is use some kind of hard labour to work off a debt, you’ve missed the point. It isn’t a debt. There isn’t anything to pay back. Actions have consequences and those consequences ARE how the universe finds its own balance. But the imbalance within yourself has to be resolved with more than a confession. You have to work at yourself. You have a responsibility to not only do right by the wronged, but to make sure you don’t wrong anyone that way again.

23.   Learn from the past. Don’t live in it.

Show me a perfect person and I will show you a person whose life means nothing. The lessons we learn, such as the ones I am now listing, are not exercises in futility. They are part of a journey. On that journey you will make mistakes. You will do things you regret. Now I am not going to tell you to forgive yourself for those mistakes. You shouldn’t. That may be an unpopular opinion, but it is also one easily justified. Just think of those who have wronged you. You may forgive them, and that’s your right. But do they have the right to forgive themselves? No. Regret is there for a reason. It’s to make us better people.

But learning from the past and letting it consume your life are two different things. You don’t HAVE to forgive those who have harmed you, but you shouldn’t live under their shadow at the same time. You shouldn’t forgive yourself, but that doesn’t mean flogging yourself daily. The reason these feelings like remorse or revenge exist are to motivate changes. Whether you want to change yourself, to make yourself less likely to be victimized, or to wrestle some kind of positive change into a world wracked by injustices. Let those feelings motivate action where it is healthy. But if there is nothing to change – let them go.

Don’t let yourself be defined by what has happened to you in the past, even if it has covered you in scars. Don’t let yourself become a trauma with a person attached. You are so much greater than that. Inside of you is a whole universe, bigger and more complex than a thousand lifetimes of regrets and mistakes. These things you cling to are remnants of lessons long ago learned and treasured. And all that pent up energy driving you to act? It comes from the memory of itself, a compulsion to change what needs to be changed as a consequence of those events. If you have done all you can at this moment to rectify those problems – allow yourself to let those clenched fists fall open.

This doesn’t mean forgiving yourself or others. It means understanding that the reason these emotions exist is to compel an action that has already been taken. The reason behind the drive has been satisfied, but people themselves are never satisfied, and that is why you have to intervene. Make a conscious decision to put the past in its place. Learn from it. Let it change you. But don’t let it dominate you. What matters now is your future.

24.   Listen to other people.

It isn’t brave or empowering to just blot out everyone else’s opinions. It isn’t a heroic struggle against adversity, in fact it’s easy. It’s TOO easy.  Anyone can just ignore people they don’t want to listen to. If you think you’re being clever by plugging your ears and singing over the appeals of your peers, then let me tell you, you’re not. Only a fool assumes that nobody else has anything of worth to share with them. What’s really challenging is being willing to hear them out. Whether you like it or not. To give serious consideration to every idea.

This is a lesson I learned not through confronting one of my own failings, but through the constant irritation of being one of those people. You know, the ones who everyone else opens up to. The ones who everyone feels compelled to spill their guts to about every deep, personal issue – but who they NEVER LISTEN TO. So I try to listen to the opinions of other people and to seriously consider what they say. The harder I want to disagree with it, the more I force myself to stop and really think about it first.

I’m tired of being right, of being the one who keeps warning others about the disasters on the horizon, only to have them completely ignore me and still get hit by it after all. I don’t mind being the one people come to for advice; in fact I like to help wherever I can. And sure, you have no obligation to take my advice. But at the same time – don’t ask for it if you don’t really want it. I can’t change the fact that no one ever listens to me, but I can at least learn from it and offer them that courtesy. That is something I work very hard at doing.

25.   Never let someone else’s presence in your life be the most important thing about it.

A life dedicated solely to another is a wasted life, and it dishonours that other person as well, as instead of enriching the world in their name, you have become an expansion of their own selfishness, doubling the negative impact they have on the world while keeping the positive impact for yourself. In a way, it turns them into an object. People are not affection dispensers that exist to make you feel good. A true loving relationship is one in which both participants try to bring out the best in the other. Living in worship or subjugation to that person is a waste of your energy and theirs.

And if you can’t find someone to give you equal love and respect? There’s nothing bad about being alone.

26.   Get back up.

Get up. It doesn’t matter how hard you got brought down, it doesn’t matter how many times they kicked you, it doesn’t matter how much it hurts. Get. Back. Up. The fact that you can hurt is the reason you can and will get back up. That pain, as an emotion, represents your thriving will to exist in a state other than defeat. Because there is still something within you that can suffer from imprisonment. You are not so broken that you have accepted the cage, and that makes you powerful.

Maybe you’re just waiting for a sign, for someone or something to give you the smallest hand up, for that tiniest bit of added ease to be an incentive to commit so much energy to the struggle. You can’t count on that in life. But fine. Let this be it. Let this be your sign. This is me telling you that now is the time. Now is ALWAYS the time. And the proof of this is in the fact that you can still be hurt. Because deep down, you still want to get up.

Pain is a symptom of having a WILL to survive. No matter how defeated you feel, no matter how broken you may be, know that there is some part of you, some divine organ in your soul that will not and cannot let you give in. Because if you can hurt, you can want for something, even if it’s just for there to be no more pain. And if you can want for something, you have hope. Those death throes you feel are the spasms of a soul that refuses to stay down until the final count. So get. Back. UP.

27.   You can’t choose to be happy. You can only choose to allow happiness in.

Peace of mind isn’t something you can order up over the phone or download from the internet. It’s not something you can request. It’s just something that kind of finds you, in its own time. And even then, it doesn’t stay. You’re never going to be happy all the time, and you know what? If you were? You would just become desensitized to it. That’s the cruel trick of life. The struggle to achieve which is so intrinsic to human nature is literally designed to be an insatiable hunger.

You’re not SUPPOSED to be able to fill that hole. The higher you climb, the higher you want to climb, because that urge to keep getting better is what has brought us this far up the evolutionary dogpile. It’s why we’re still alive. But it’s also why the richest and most powerful keep trying to accrue more wealth and power. Why those who have everything they could ever want still seem to invariably turn to drugs and corruption.  Endless happiness is like the floater in your eye you keep trying to chase but never catch.

I think you have to have fallen to the deepest pits of despair, and made it your home to really understand what happiness is. To recognize it when it graces the periphery of your ceaseless sensory bombardment. It isn’t a blinding sunbeam that parts the clouds. It’s a glance of soft light that traces the contours of a vase by the window. The gentle swaying of a tree in the wind. The tiny moments when you peer into the cracked stone of a pavement and feel something not quite explainable move through you. The stillness between struggles. Happiness is realising you have the capacity to not be in pain, if but for a short while.

But you have to let it in.

28.   What’s more important?

I don’t know if this is strictly a lesson or more of a general attitude, the lines are beginning to blur at this point. This is something I say to myself whenever I can. It’s a kind of motivating mantra that helps me put things in perspective. Every day I find myself so bogged down with trivial concerns and problems that seem so big. I seem to have so much going on in my head, it can become this chaotic fog of anxieties, obligations, and half-formed thoughts.

What’s more important? I’m not sure I even understand what the question means, but somehow it cuts right through the fog and brings me into perfect alignment with my own centre. I suppose what it really means is… keep your dreams inside you. It’s a reality check. Know what it is you want to do, why you want to do it – why it NEEDS to be done, and always make sure you are moving in that direction. It doesn’t matter how slowly you’re moving, just so long as you’re closer today than you were yesterday.

If you find yourself going backwards, that’s okay. It happens. The purpose of this mantra is not to shame you for your mistakes, but to help you recognize them, so you don’t keep going backwards. Whenever the haze overtakes your eyes, whenever you find life hitting you with obstacle after obstacle and in all the chaos you get turned around, you lose sight of who you are and where you’re going… stop. Ask yourself. What’s more important? The answer isn’t always obvious or easy, but it’s always there. It’s always a truth that lives at the core of you. Seek it. Find it. Cherish it. And then dedicate every moment of your life to realizing it.

29.   Everyone has their own story.

You’re not the only one who has known this pain. You’re not even the most hurt person you know. The truth is we are all tangled in an invisible mess of other people’s plot threads. We all play unseen roles in other people’s experiences. Our words, our presence, the things we do all have a weight to them that cannot be immediately felt, but which change the balance of countless variables around us. Even those you try to keep away from your life to protect them are, in this way, affected by you. They all have their own story, just like yours.

Never consider them the supporting cast in your own. When you close the chat window or hang up the phone, they keep existing. Things happen to them. They change. They hurt. They experience things you can’t imagine. When you next speak to them, do not assume that time has stood still for them or that they are the same people you last spoke to with the same limits or issues. Likewise, if you think you have someone pegged at a single glance, if you think they can be boiled down to the handful of conclusions you reached about them – think again.

You might think someone is lazy because they are poor. Or that they are snobbish if they are rich. You might think the Republican is a monster, or the Democrat is a wuss. But stop and consider the possibility that those other people arrived at the conclusions they did for very real, sensible reasons. They are real people. They have histories spanning years or decades, and you can’t sum them up to one memory or a title. Maybe if you had been in their shoes, you would be like them too. Maybe their stories matter as much as yours does.

If someone seems to have changed, or if they now hold views you didn’t expect of them, inquire as to why. Learn about them. Take a few steps of their journey with them rather than just dismissing them out of hand. Chances are, they’ve learned a few things you could benefit from as well. You don’t have to manifest their views in order to respect them.

30.   Don’t be afraid of tasking risks or seeking out new opportunities.

This is a lesson I have learned, but not internalized. Fear and the resistance of obstructive circumstances can be hard things to face. Perhaps even insurmountable. But the fact that I am not practising what I preach on this one does not make the lesson wrong. It means that I am proof that it is right. I am stuck at square one because I have yet to embrace this lesson, and I know I am wrong for not doing so. Don’t be like me. Be better.

31.   Never make promises you can’t keep.

As a kid I always longed to visit Loch Ness. Something in my spirit called for me to be there, and I’ve never figured out why. My parents always promised to one day take me there. That never really happened. It's nobody's fault, we were a poor family. And it’s not a big deal now, but it was a major disappointment to me at the time. That was probably around the time I first decided that I wouldn’t take promises lightly. But I’ve been disappointed far worse many more times since then, and this has only compounded how seriously I take them.

Broken promises sting like the worst papercut, whether it’s the broken trust of a colleague who lets you down, or the almost always unsustainable vow of eternal love. Living in a world where we can count on one another is so important, particularly to us, as a social species. That’s why it always wounds our hearts at least a little bit when other people fail us, and so much more when we are betrayed. Deep down, I don’t really believe that other people can be counted on. I’ve been betrayed too many times myself, been disappointed by too many people to really believe that. But I’d like to. And that’s why I live by example on this one.

When you make a vow you are taking a hypothetical future and converting it into a fact. You are staking your honour as a human being on that reality coming to fruition. Promises are more than just words, they are assurances of trust, a stable wall upon which those who are in need will lean in difficult times. Even a small promise, something seemingly inconsequential, carries encoded within it your intrinsic trustworthiness. Letting people down when you have given them that stability, that reassurance in the future has a negative effect on you, and on the rest of the world. Take your promises seriously, or don’t make them at all. This is the only way you can help cultivate a society where we can count on one another.


32. Count your victories (Not just your defeats)

I bet if I asked for you a list of every mistake, every dumb thing you did, everything you got wrong this week you wouldn’t have to think all that hard to come up with one. But who is counting everything you got right? That’s just not how the human mind works, right? I mean, how do you count how many times you DIDN’T trip up?  But YOU know what your limitations are, probably better than anyone else. You know what you struggle with, what’s difficult for you. If you are trying to improve yourself, if you’re trying to expand your horizons, and all you’re counting are the trips, how can you ever make any progress? For progress to be made you also need to CHART it, to RECOGNIZE when it happens, otherwise, how can you know if you’ve progressed?

There isn’t a scale for what constitutes a valid success. Everyone’s life is different. It’s more about what challenges you’re dealing with, and how they personally affect you. Don’t let anyone tell you that if your biggest problem is getting out of bed and facing the world in the morning, that’s not enough to be considered a real challenge. We define challenges not by some objective standard, but by how CHALLENGING they are, and that is necessarily a personal definition. The best singer in the world might find no challenge at all in singing a particular song, that doesn’t mean it should be easy to anyone else. Likewise, if just walking from one room to another is a challenge for you, for whatever reason, the fact that it would be easy for most people doesn’t negate that difficulty.

Whether it’s physical or emotional, every single day you are fighting against the resistance of your own limits, and every day you advance a lot further than you realise. Don’t just set your course – chart it. Recognize your victories as they come. Some days it will be one step forward - three steps back, but here’s the thing, you KNOW, now, that you can handle that step forward. But no one ever had to convince you that you could fall a few steps back, did they? That’s why it’s important. Because in the grand scheme of things, that one step was a permanent expansion of your frontiers, you pushed the borders of your world just a little bit further than they were the day before, and if you don’t think that’s a victory, you’re crazy. It is. But you have to let yourself be proud. Today you did several things, probably MANY things to be proud of, but all you’re thinking about is the coffee you spilled this morning.

It’s easy to be conscious of your defeats. Life trains us to be that way. And you should be- that’s how we learn. Unfortunately, you have to train YOURSELF to  be just as aware of your victories. It’s as hard for me as it is for anyone, but trust me, your life gets a lot better if you recognize and reward the progress you make, when you make it. Because the truth is, we’re all going somewhere, and we’re all trying our best. Today, you’re a little bit closer than you were yesterday, EVEN if today was a bad day. Stop and think about it, and you’ll see I’m right.

33. SAY YES!

This is a lesson I have embraced in this past year of my life, and have been trying to embrace to varying degrees for even longer than that. Due to the way my own problems affect me, I would never even get out of the house if someone didn't snag me with a crook and drag me out. I live the life of a stone. Just resting in place watching things change around me. And I won't lie, there is a certain stillness to that life that is very appealing. But it's not healthy. So despite how difficult this is, I have worked very hard to embrace the idea of saying YES to every opportunity. Because I know I will never seek them out left to my own devices.

     This has taken on many forms. Allowing myself to become closer to my friends, allowing people to help me when I clearly need help – even seemingly small things like just agreeing to meet up with a visiting friend or talking more with people face to face. Things that might be nothing to you but are huge to my scrambled brain. You can look at this as an experiment. I observed that everything in my life was standing still, and I recognized that I needed motion to keep from going stale in myself. So... every time someone asked me if I wanted to do something; I said yes. Even when I really, really didn't want to. It's the anxiety of living, it's kicking the chick out of the nest. It's how we move forward. And in my case, it seems to be the only way I can. I need to sort of piggyback on the motivation of others to fill the void where mine should be.

     I can't promise you that your life will definitely be better if you start seizing every opportunity presented to you, but it will sure as shit be more interesting. Adventure is scary, and for some people just going outdoors is an adventure. It doesn't matter. You have your own lines in the sand, and they exist to be crossed. Expanding the borders of your life is how you find the room to grow as a person, and you're not just taking up space. There's a precious overlap with all the people in your life that you care about, and in those crossings are all the most treasured memories your future self would be so glad you allowed yourself to live. Life as a stone is so appealing, so addicting. But there's always time to be a stone. You only get one lifetime to be you.

   

      Say yes, and the worst possible thing that will happen is you learn what you DON'T want to do. That's a way of growing too.

34.    And finally, this above all else: Times will be hard. Sometimes they will be harder than the worst times you’ve ever lived through. But they will be better, too.

People have a tendency to be so negative. It’s like the bad things in life stick to us while all the good things seem to rot away with time. Scars remain but caresses leave no marks. Pain stays with us while kisses are forgotten. As human beings, we fixate on the negative, we stew in it until it’s pickled into our souls and we can’t get away. Sad memories, loss and failure become a part of us. We get so used to seeing the bad that we forget that good can exist too.

But that’s just genetics. We’re prone to negativity for survival reasons. It’s the evolutionary advantage of fleeing in terror from every sound. By only believing in the bad things we have a higher chance to survive when the bad things are real; and there is a legitimate advantage to that. We SHOULD be aware of the bad.

But look, we’re more than just animals. We are the part of the universe that can think and feel and analyse. The part that looks upon itself in awe. So we have a responsibility to BE more than animals. Animals can get by on instinct and reaction alone, but we can’t. We have to be able to maintain our sanity as well as our bodies. To do that, we have to internalize the fact that however dark our nights may be, there can and will always be a sunrise.

That goes for you, too. The person reading this right now. You’ve lived through hard times, and they’re far from over. Life is a constant struggle. But that’s not ALL it is. Whenever you have a good day, remember it. And next time you have a bad one, remember that those good days exist. Whenever you triumph over your own shortcomings, or defeat the adversity in your life – REMEMBER that you did it. And next time you face an un-climbable wall, remember what happened to the last one, and break right through it. You’re stronger than you think you are, and dark days will always be bright again.

At least, that’s what I choose to believe. That’s my hope. May it be yours, too.

Connection Lost

I see a lot of people sharing memes and comments lately about how phones are dividing us. From humorous depictions of roaming teenagers with smartphones as modern-day zombies, to snarky, passive-aggressive remarks about how antisocial it is to keep your nose stuck in your phone at the dinner table. And I'll say it right now - that's quite true. There's a time for being online, and there's a time to unplug. When you have friends and family within eyeshot, try poking them, rather than your Facebook friends.

But at the same time, I think the demonization of technology has been fairly stereo since the stereo. People have always feared the coppery thin fingers of electrical assimilation. The thing is, advancement comes at a cost, and people sometimes forget that. Think how many people were laid off because of the steam engine? The computer? The auto-mobile? The concessions aren't just vocational, but social. Society had to be adapted around the building of roads, the wiring of homes, and that produces a lot of social anxiety. But TV doesn't rot brains, rock music doesn't summon the devil, video games don't incite violence, and phones don't REALLY disconnect us.

Photographic memories of our lives now given way to cameraphones, virtual post-it notes to remind us of our priorities, time-keepers to guide us through the day. These were all good things before phones replaced them, and they now remain good things. But the purpose of a phone has always remained the same. To call. To connect people. That's why we don't call them mobile calenders. Some people seem to resent phones, seeing them as a barrier to socialization. But my phone lets me talk to people on the other side of the planet - and I frequently do! My phone streams a live feed of information and education through my eyes, and allows me to share how it all makes me feel with friends that I might have drifted apart from years ago otherwise.

And it's not just phones that people are complaining about. We now have this mythical "internet/Facebook addiction", which I'm sure, in some very extreme cases, may be real, but let's be serious; barely, even then. The nature of the online world is such that it doesn't really impede your life in any way. No active work is required to be online 24/7, it's just... there. Like a new sense. We can tweet, socialize, listen to music, know where we are, look up information and even shop with relative ease because these things are all designed to be convenient. To say this is some sort of step backwards is to wrap your brain with the same logic that could easily send us careening back to the horse and cart.

ALL technology is designed around convenience, but this doesn't make it negative or make us weaker. Thanks to the ubiquitous access to information, we are more intelligent as a species than ever before. Better educated, better informed, and with better opportunities. I don't like people who belittle the poor by making snide remarks about how they have smartphones, etc, as that logic doesn't make sense, but I do admit that the reason WHY it doesn't make sense is simply because modern society has a different standard of underprivileged. Thanks to technology I can do things right now that people even a few years ago could only have dreamed about, even if I were homeless and starving. We should be appreciative, not resentful, of everything technology has given us.

Technology changes everything, acting as a conduit for the will of the people and often guiding, sometimes forcefully, the stagnant government to something approaching modernization. Sometimes it feels like we are living in times darker than ever before, but that's only really because technology has given us such awareness of the world that we now KNOW how much suffering is happening out there in order to care about it. And the fact that we care shows how these devices don't have to be our masters, but rather a tool for bringing out the best in us. I won't say that a person isn't poor just because they have clothes, good health, and a Tinder profile. But I will say that they are, in their own way, wealthier than they know. We all are. It's a good thing when the definition of "worst off" changes for the better.

Now, look, I freely admit, it annoys the crap out of me when one of my friends (one in particular)  decides to snub a conversation with me, often in mid-sentence, to text with someone else. It's rude and stupid. Prioritize the person you are PHYSICALLY WITH, at least until you get to the end of your fucking sentence. But at the same time, we all have to adjust our expectations. We have to realize that an invisible conversation with someone else is STILL a conversation. Turning from one friend to listen to another say something would not be considered incredibly rude. Not being able to see the other friend shouldn't REALLY change all that much. It's just a new age, and we have to develop a new etiquette around it.

But fear of change is as central to the human experience as kidneys. Having to adapt to an entirely new concept of socialization is going to take time. I understand why it would seem strange and jarring to be surrounded by people walking around staring into their hands, especially if you didn't grow up with anything remotely like that. But to call it antisocial? Nothing could be further from the truth. Generations past hardly had a notion of what it was to commune with someone across the globe. How many had pen pals in distant, exotic countries? How many could afford to phone their friends to stay in touch every night? How many people over the age of forty can claim to have had half as much of a social experience in their youth as I had in mine?

Now, because of this technology people insist is so socially numbing, my most treasured friends live in places I would certainly have never found myself alone. Even AS a person who isn't very social by nature, I find that technology grants me a window out of my shell that lets me interact with people even more than I normally would. I laugh and chatter and connect with people, my family included, every single day. In many ways I get to be more myself online than I would be inclined to in real life. I *AM* social. Even if, to an outside observer, it looks like I just have my nose in my phone.

Different types of connections do not undermine or cancel each other out. They just add new ways in which we can be all be closer. If you want the attention of someone on their phone, reach out and touch them. Speak their name. No technology will ever rob us of the power and intimacy of those things. Connections aren't lost in the information highway, they're lost because we stop trying to reach out to one another. And if a phone can get in the way of a family - there's something wrong with the family, not the phone.

We should never blame our own short-falls on that which elevates us to the very same heights from which we fear falling. In a generation or two, I doubt anyone will care. It'll be my generation complaining about how cybernetic brain communicators are disconnecting us. :P And quite frankly, I don't like the "music" kids are listening to these days, either.

Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud

This may seem like a slightly jarring change of pace to the four people who have ever read my blog before. Normally I reserve tl;dr for rambly informative type posts and rants, few and far between though they are. I tried the "journal" thing before in past blogs, and it never went well. I suppose I'm just not good at talking about myself. But... well. I honestly don't have anyone else in my life to talk to. Those I would talk to, I can't, because they're either gone or just not interested.

That kind of thing doesn't normally bother me. I am absolutely not the "lonely" type. But I'm going through some changes that I might process better if I can articulate them in some way. I'm a healthy pessimist by nature, and therefore naturally expect the worst to happen. But I am not always prepared for the breadth of that worst case scenario. I am just now coming out of the very end of a complicated and somewhat emotionally devastating couple of... well, decades.

It's a strange thing, to ride through an inferno you know will obliterate you, and find yourself trundling back out the other side. The white-knuckle ride you thought would never end, suddenly you're stepping out of the rollercoaster and that consistent, persistent present has become the past. You know how when you watch a really engrossing movie? You get super into it, invested in that world, and then the movie ends and for a moment you have to kind of reacquaint yourself with your own life? It's kind of like that... only there was no pre-existing life to begin with.

I've always been obsessively self-aware, feeling like there was a camera trained on me every waking moment - but suddenly I'm conscious of feeling like the world is painted around me in some surreal Truman show-esque bad trip. Nothing feels quite real. I've been battered to the point of losing any cohesive understanding of my reality, resigning me to the role of a baby in a cot surrounded by strange shapes and sounds I have no thoughts about. I'm trying to figure everything out, trying to understand everything like an alien with no understanding of human ways or emotions.

It's difficult to express how I've experienced this change and just how drastic it is. There's this "how am I still here" question permeating my every thought with the insistence of a body that has been mutilated, broken, pulled open and reduced to a pile of bloodied meat - yet STILL remains somehow alive. To have come so completely apart at the seams, and still be staggering through the wilderness. How much more broken can you get? Everything is confusing to me because I'm viewing every experience through the lens of that giant question mark.

I suppose what's really confusing me is not having the convenient narrative of a single, unending emotion being the defining character trait around which I can base my life. Being able to wake up every day and know that "I'm the sad guy" has a certain stability to it. It took falling through a few extra cinderblock floors of anguish to really finish off what remained of that identity. Being brought so far past your capacity to contain said emotions that your whole world just sort of unravels into a naked, quivering ball of consciousness - and then you don't understand anything.

The final step was the hardest. Letting go. The Salvador Dali painting that had become my life in the wake of this trauma was already an endless nightmare. But those final dying convulsions of severing away the past, I can only compare to... well, I once had a tooth abscess. If you don't know what that is - be glad. My dentist screwed me over, and due to a complicated series of events, I ended up riding it out without any pain killers. The nerve in my tooth was infected. I had to wait for it to literally die before the agony would stop. It was like being electrocuted, bolts of lightning constantly streaming into my jaw, shattering it apart. My pulse became my enemy, squeezing cold flashes of concentrated scream into my skull every second.

Life wants to persist, even the smallest part of it. That's why we fight tooth and nail to survive, why a cornered animal is most dangerous. It is when the darkness of oblivion closes around us that we panic and cling hardest to life, and in that moment we learn to value it as we never did before. Even our bodies, the product of an evolution based on fear, respond the same way. That nerve tortured me with a desperate struggle to resist as it slowly withered into a twitching husk. I felt it turn necrotic, I felt it slowly die, trying to take me with it. So, too, was it that way with this trauma.

Letting it go was like pulling out my entire nervous system. Tugging against a bramble of heartstrings to escape, snapping them one at a time. I left so much of myself behind it felt like there was more of the person I once called me in the rotting meat slopping to the floor than in what staggered away. But, strangely, like the dying nerve, only the diseased parts of me had been cut away. It was the important parts that survived. There was that same odd relief in finding the pain had dulled to a quiet ache.

I honestly didn't think I would survive what I went through. I didn't even want to. But I did survive, somehow. And now, for the first time in years, I've gotten to a place where I don't feel like dying every time I wake up. But what's confusing me is I don't understand what I DO feel. Other than confusion, as I just said. And kind of hungry. Other than confusion and hunger I don't know what I feel. The pain has been my reality for so long I'm kind of tripping without it. Well, it's still there, but now it's just part of the furniture of my life. I'm learning that there's more.

It's kind of like someone switched off my life-support machine, and I just didn't die. There's nothing but a cold silence and a lot of confused staring. Maybe some awkward small talk. What happens now? The last few years have broken my psyche into so many pieces I no longer have any concept of where in all the debris "I" actually am. And yet, somehow... I am. It turns out you can't just stop existing as a consequence of having your sanity crumpled up into a ball of paper and thrown away. 

Soooo.... what now?

I feel kind of like the broom that's had both its head and its handle changed several dozen times. I'm so far removed from what I started out as that there's really nothing left in me of that person anymore. I've become this Frankensteinian patchwork of different ideas and personality traits. This has always largely been the case, and I've traditionally been okay with that. Exchanging different swatches of personality with new ones, designing myself how I want to be. But I suppose the key difference is what lies at the core of it all. The raw engine beneath the chassis. That's what has been destroyed.

And now I'm hovering around, this confused, embodied spirit awaiting a bright light, or a sign post, or hell I'd take a cryptic candybar wrapper. Not really sure where to go, or who to be. But here's the strange bit... there's almost a burden lifted from realising... I don't have to be the sad guy anymore. Yes it's bewildering, kinda scary and uncomfortable. But, I'm kind of... okay? Is that a thing? Is there a word for not-crushing-depression-despondence? Is there a word for kind of wanting the bungee rope to bounce you back up?

I've spent so long building this elaborate mansion around myself out of the very stuff of my pain. My masterpiece and home, where I can at least find safety in consistency. And then when it finally reached its critical mass, it all just kind of collapsed around me, and the sun broke through, and I'm like "Holy fuck what is that?", and then some guy, I assume he's a neighbour living in a slightly less-impressive pain mansion nearby, is like "Uhh, dude, that's the sun", and I'm like "Well I don't like it. Make it go away." But actually I kind of *do* like it? You know. That old chestnut.

So, what is this even? Am I complaining because of the complete implosion of my mind and subsequent annihilation of my self-understanding? Or am I expressing a cautious optimism about coming out of the other end of a very long, dark tunnel? I don't know that I'm there yet. Just to get to this point I had to sink to the very rockiest part of rock bottom. I mean, I thought I was broken already, but there was a time, VERY recently when I honestly couldn't take another second of life. Breathing was a poison to me. My heart was beating splinters.

I don't know that I'm all the way out of that, yet. As I said, that pain is still there, still very much a part of me. And I've been tormented for so long it's like my default state. Every time I think I am doing better, something sets off a chain of thoughts that leads me back into that darkness, and boom. Just like that, I'm back there, right on the brink. Right on the absolute edge. Hanging over, my stomach jumping with that weightless feeling that just precedes the fall, when the ground is no longer quite supporting you and you already know you're past the point of no return. That close to the edge.

My vagueries are probably annoying, as I'm obviously not comfortable revealing the gory details of just what my journey to this point has involved. Partly because it's not just my story to tell, but also because the details aren't the important bit. Suffice to say, I can sum it up with one sentiment. I haven't cried since I was a kid. Maybe once or twice, and a couple of sniffles here and there. But I've always held back from letting the tears escape my eyes. There was a reason for this. A reason I never shared with anyone. I honestly believed that if I ever let myself start... I will never stop.

Then something finally tipped me over the edge, and I started. And it went on... and on... and on. Did it stop? I don't know... but it did kind of abate over time. And now I guess I'm discovering that I needed that push. Many years of wrongness have been crystallised into this one symbolic act that I can wrangle and kind of subdue in a clean, tidy exchange of fluids and mental energy. I suppose, logically, that's the point of crying. But sometimes it feels less like a purge and more like being locked in an echo chamber, magnifying what I don't want to look at until it dominates everything.

Put simply, it took being finally and completely shattered to realise that maybe there's a chance that I can reforge myself into something new. And now, that's what I'm trying to discover. How to do that. Part of the dilemma surfaced in my first paragraph. I'm going through this strange paradigm-shift, this relayering of my persona, and I don't know who to talk to about it. In some ways this is tangentially related to how I got in this mess to begin with, but now I find myself with a burning need to sit someone down and ask them a bunch of questions about how life and stuff works... and I don't have anyone.

I've never needed friends. I find them needy and annoying. And they make you do stuff and go to things like parties, and talk to people. I mean, what's up with that? But now I... want to talk? Oh god, I just threw up in my mouth a little. Am I that guy now? I'm finding myself approach people whose company I can tolerate and initiating conversation. I mean I still lack any ability to talk about myself, but still. I talk TO them for some reason. I guess companionship is part of being one of those human things I'm supposed to be. I don't like it. It's too bright and sunny... I miss the clouds.

Joking aside - the hard part is that I know that even as I explore this spectrum of long-suppressed emotions, there are some I can never have. Maybe I don't have to be the sad guy. But I can never be the happy guy, either, and failing that I am predisposed to the sadness. I was better off not knowing that happiness could exist. Joy is something I have learned to fear, and fear is something I have to learn to deal with. Not least of which being the fear of what happens the next time that darkness takes me, and I find myself back at that edge, inexplicably incapable of handling another second of sentient existence.

There is one small silver lining, however. I can listen to music again. I haven't been able to for a long time now, not for very long anyway. Anything that can elicit an emotional response in me started to vibrate in my soul uncontrollably ripping apart the staples and duct tape that were holding me together. Now, I'm slowly finding that there are some songs I can listen to without feeling the cracks widening, and I'm obsessively gathering them all up. I'm also getting back into writing again, which I've had on temporary hold for the foreseeable... lifetime. I guess that's a good sign?

The bottom line is, I am becoming something new. This is the chrysalis of my next life. Part of that entails burning away what remains of the scar tissue wedged in my bones from the life that destroyed me. Part of it seems to entail learning how these emotion things work and what to do with myself now. I have to make some important decisions about who I really want to waste my energy on. Some people have become nothing but sources of negativity to me, and I don't need that in my life. There is a chance that I am on a positive course. Bruised and scarred though I am, and always will be, I can forswear the illusion of happiness and maybe begin to pursue something approaching contentment.

You know... my life was a lot less complicated when I was a godamned robot.

¡Cállate, Mateo!

To make up for my frequent bouts of inactivity, here is a short, introspective story I wrote some time ago. Not very tl;dr, I know. It's just something to keep my blog warm while I continue cooking up new posts.


¡Cállate, Mateo!


On the first day of class, I felt immediately relieved for having selected Spanish over French. I was in the minority; some unexplained force seemed to draw everyone towards French classes. I didn’t get why. It smelled of a bandwagon and that always repels me. I never really cared much for French stuff. To me it always felt distant and sterile, somehow lacking in anything I could connect myself to. Spain, well... I knew absolutely nothing about Spain. It had that totally alien, yet exotically interesting vibe to it.

As soon as I saw my teacher, Ms Royale, I knew I would enjoy this new cultural experience. She had long, oversized sculptures dangling from her ears, her dress was flamboyant with a hundred dark shades of a hundred different colours I had never quite pictured side-by-side before. She had decorated the classroom in a similar style. Lush with foreign posters, pictures, tapestries, and all the peculiar knickknacks you would expect to see from a souvenir stall beside some sun-baked road in the middle of nowhere.

She had that exaggerated warmth and welcoming demeanour that you might expect from a cultural stereotype, carrying herself as if she was everyone’s great aunt, and similarly starved for attention since the last Christmas you spent reluctantly indulging her in some boring hour-long conversation. You half expected her to grab your cheek and jiggle it about making kissy-faces. Almost too energetic. Every action she took was somehow emphatic and dance-like. Mature and yet full of life, the class was her spotlight and she virulently held everyone’s attention.

Unfortunately my first day in class carried a very different feel. Far from exotic and different, it ended up being just as confusing as every other class. The words being explained to me were like white noise, the letters on the bland droning textbooks seemed to be obfuscated by thousands of tiny blind-spots in my eyes simply refusing to let me read them. Spain no longer seemed like some distant adventure, suddenly it was just foreign, and me, stranded there, unable to even ask for directions.

In those first few weeks I did my best. I asked for help but was told to shut up, in Spanish of course. Though I tried to listen hard and learn, I quickly found my brain shutting down and my internal fantasy software powering up. The more I tried to focus the more hypnotized I became by the unchanging, meaningless static until my fantasy world closed in around me and enveloped it all like a rising tide. Before I knew what was happening, a biting Spanish voice struck me like a whip, and a hundred eyes now staring at me melted through whatever adventure I had conjured for myself.

A humiliation I was not unaccustomed to, being escorted to the door by a pointed finger and a disdainful look. Marched in implicit handcuffs to be punished for my crime. I was accustomed to it, and lacking the vocabulary to express myself, I had long given up on protestations of unfairness. I gathered up the crumbling remnants of my pride and carried them wherever I was sent. Understanding why had become a thing of myth, no more real to me than tribesmen dancing around a totem pole to make it rain.

Over the years I began to act out. As boys do. I clowned around for attention; I roused the rabble and pushed at the boundaries of what I could get away with. My attention on a knife-edge between hunger for knowledge and apathy, the tipping balance of that toxic classroom had rendered me just bored enough to be desperate for some kind of interaction, and just hated enough for my boredom to be an excuse not to teach, rather than taken as an invitation to do so. My antics went over with the godly Ms Royale even worse than the other teachers.

When you really think about it, if you take the actual learning out of a classroom, what you’re left with is a lot like solitary confinement. Sure, you’re not alone... but you may as well be. Everyone else seems to be in this parallel universe where everything makes sense. Rapidly scrawling at their textbooks with complete understanding, as if possessed. You’re in the same place as them, but you’re... absent. What you’re left with is a room that is empty of all but potential sources of embarrassment, and a single glaring entity at the other end of the room. The watchful camera making sure you don’t try to escape.

Of course, escape is impossible. The class becomes an endurance round. How long can a child of 13 sit perfectly still, pretending to be interested, while having absolutely nothing to engage him? Among the many thoughts that swim around in this sensory deprivation tank of an experience are the ponderings on why we use this format to teach children at all? Clearly it doesn’t work for everyone. Is the purpose merely to force the child to learn? Or is it more about breaking their spirit? Was this my labour, my community service? I can’t say if it was tough love or punishment, but I can say what it felt like. Especially when my effort to participate was sincere.

Inability to learn is so easily confused with some kind of stubborn refusal. Struggle, conflated with mischief, and soon enough, the wardens are sent in to give you a few knocks and ensure that you go back to pretending you understand. Eyes ahead. Hands still. Make no movements. Now write something, but pray we don’t check what we wrote, because we know you don’t know what to actually write. My poor handwriting was a useful tool in such situations, one look at the scribbled mess on my page and their slack-jawed confoundedness got me out of trouble. You can’t accuse me of not taking the right notes if you don’t know what I wrote, can you?

Ms Royal, however, was strangely immune to my survival mechanisms. She didn’t care about punishment or teaching, she simply didn’t care. After the seventeenth or so instance of my misbehaviour, whether rightly or wrongly classified as such, she found the solution. I was to be given my own desk! Outside the classroom. Where I would sit, in the hall, every single lesson for the ensuing 4 years. I was close enough to the door to hear them chanting their lingual lessons over and over; able to feel the energy of their minds assimilating that information, but it was too muffled for me to learn along with them.

The desk became a home away from home for me. I added to its ingrained album of graffiti with my own personal touches. I practised my drawing in whatever paper I had handy. My fantasies left the shores of pretend worlds and now were of my being in the class with them. But the desk was still my cage. I lived there, outside the class, outside of everything, and I listened to the other children learning. This was my labour. This was my punishment for not being able to understand.

Needless to say; this did not help with my acting out. The best way to make a criminal out of someone is to brand and treat them as a criminal. School gave up on me, so I gave up on school. I pushed the envelope further than ever. Though not all my classes had taken to emulating Ms Royale’s solution for miscreancy, detention came a close second. So my Spanish classes were spent outside of the classroom, and my evenings were spent doing “lines” in detention. I stopped remembering what it was like to feel anything but resent for my teachers, or to walk home when it wasn’t already dark.

Those days were my purgatory. Without a sense of meaningful feedback on your actions, you can no longer differentiate between punishment for the sake of teaching you a wrong, and punishment coming from out of nowhere. You’re damned if you don’t and more damned if you do. Every action or inaction ends up being wrong, and you can’t even ask why without screwing it up somehow. Mind-shatteringly resigned to stepping about without aim in this psychological minefield, you eventually retreat into a stunted trance like a traumatized lab-rat.

They say school lasts as long as it does because that is precisely how long it takes to break a child, but whatever my indulgence in self-pity, I am nothing if not a fighter, and I wasn’t giving up without one. I tried several times to sneak into the classroom at the start of Spanish class. Keeping my head low. Trying to steal moments of education before my theft of what didn’t belong to me became noticed. Despite my insistence to stay, I was directed out of the class every time.

Of course, none of this really had much impact on what grades, coursework or homework would be expected of me. The obligation to succeed rested on no one but me, but to actually present me with the knowledge I required was nobody’s job. Towards the end of school, I actually started to care about that. I became conscious of how much time I had lost, how much information had never reached my ears. I wanted to do WELL, to know I at least tried before resigning myself to the failure everyone knew I would be for the rest of my life. I had to know it wasn’t JUST me.

So I battled Ms Royale to let me into the class, and didn’t let up. I didn’t comprehend this at the time, because I thought it had all been completely just and entirely my own fault, but of course she could hardly call my bluff and send me to the principal. What would he say, “How dare you try to learn?”? So she acquiesced and allowed me into the classroom. I beamed with joy at the thought of learning – an odd experience for me to say the least. Of course, with that came a new conundrum; everyone was much further along than me. Everyone knew the basics, even the advanced stuff. I still couldn’t even say my name.

I put my hand up several times in the first fifteen minutes, asking what this meant and that, asking for clarifications on everything. Eventually she got sick of answering me and started telling me to shut up in Spanish. “Cállate, Mateo”... shut up, Matthew. I didn’t shut up. I kept asking questions. I kept raising my hand. When she ignored me, I blurted them out. I refused to let her beat me. And she didn’t. Not alone. She enlisted the help of the class, teaching them all to chant “Cállate, Mateo. ¡Cállate, Mateo!” She conducted this orchestra to rise in volume the more I tried to participate, until I was beat down to silence.

It didn’t stop with my submission, however. “Cállate, Mateo. Cállate, Mateo. Cállate, Mateo.” I escorted myself out of the class. Back to my desk, my home, where I at least understood the rules. I could attempt to explain the quivering ball of emotion that swelled inside my chest, the collection of all the moisture in my body into a single well behind my eyes, but I could never do it justice. Suffice to say; knowing that you are the one that everyone unanimously agrees shouldn’t be here is a very specific brand of loneliness. I was the bad guy. No point in disagreeing.

After this happened several more times, I gave up. I lost the will to participate. I lost the care to complain that she (and many others) were insistent on interpreting my difficulties in keeping up with the class as trouble-making, stubbornness, the malicious behaviour of someone who isn’t interested in learning. They saw me as the enemy, not as a child, and I was held to the standards of a belligerent adult, when all I had done was try, and sometimes fail, to learn.

It can hurt more than you expect, to see someone you in some way look up to, a teacher, a mentor, the custodian of your enlightenment turn on you out of pettiness, insecurity or impatience. The people you depend on, the gatekeepers of knowledge, you expect fairness from them. You expect to, in some way, matter to them. School does, indeed, last just long enough to break a child. But I still never gave in. I still attended, I still at least TRIED to learn, and I still completed my exams, and passed with flying “meh”. I got beaten, but I didn’t give up. I proved that it wasn’t just me.

So go ahead, tell me to shut up. Judge me. But I’ve never needed a choir backing me up to make my own case, and when I fail, it’s never permanent. Because I Don’t. Give. Up.