After Eight

Things I wrote at a night out in After Eight, needless to say a few drinks into the night.

"Of all the things I fear, I fear my failure to act my role the most. I have no given role at disposition and therefore I look for one that's not my own."

About a picture on the wall full of stella bottles: "18 bottles of beer on the wall, how many others have counted that?"

"My heart goes out to those lost in the tyranny of their thought, it's the worst kind."

"All of this makes no sense to the dancing folk, they're too busy getting lost."

The Outsider

Yet again I am reminded of how much I don't belong and even more when amidst a crowd. I recognize that it's not the drinking or the loud music that gives me that same feeling of alienation every time I'm somewhere loud with dancing and drinking; it's seeing others having fun. I'm so aware of myself looking upon the scene as if I wasn't there and it's right that I should, I don't belong there.

My alienation most of my life has caused me to put up defensive measures, I knew I could not belong very early on in life and I shielded my desire to belong with a façade. I built a shield perhaps about how I feel in general and it seems that I've perfected my defenses that people cannot see a thing past them.

I've been told recently that I was someone who was not moved by others and that I didn't care much for others. While I actually do care very little for strangers or people who are insignificant in my life, this doesn't extend to those close to me for whom I break all the rules. It seems that the deception has been complete that no one believes anymore that I can be moved. I've also been told that I'm a dispassionate person, I'm an outsider like the protagonist of the story by Camus. I can feel the estrangement from the world but I can't feel the same hopelessness and inertness.

In any case it seems that the person I am is unknown to most people other than me, and there's something good and bad about this. The truth is that the person inside is someone who doesn't belong and if that was all that people saw, they wouldn't look twice. It's not worth noticing that person inside with all the darkness and unexplained sadness although I'm sure that many others can relate to him. The person on the outside is immune to all this and gives off different vibes, he's the one that people can deal with.

My posts don't say very much about me, not when I read them, and yet people can guess all sorts of things about me when they read them and I'm not entirely sure if they're right, because with all that I hold back it seems that so much is missing. Maybe my reality is what people truly see and which I will discover within me later, maybe what I write says more about me than I think. I really don't know and even the person I've become is alien to people, they can't relate to me because they feel I can't feel. The truth is that I have to put a lid on all that I feel; all these feelings and thoughts, I have to keep them under control because expressing everything has hurt me a lot in the past.

I'm not sure whether everyone feels this way too or not, but I know that I haven't helped this feeling by taking my own route with most things. It's not that no one else agrees with me but my own path is motivated by me. I'm not trying to be different, but I just like to know where I am and how I got there. I'm too liberal for conservatives and I'm too conservative for liberals. I'm always out of place because I don't subscribe entirely to one thing. I do things but never feel that I'm part of the club.

Entangled Ropes

When you're in a relationship with someone they become a part of you. Your parts and theirs are entangled together like two ropes knotted randomly over and over. When you break up you get detached from that person and when they leave they take away that part of you. There's no way to disentangle your bits from theirs and so what happens is the equivalence of passing scissors through both strings to let them loose. That's why the person breaking up gets away intact, he's managed to get all his rope and bits and pieces of the other's, it really depends on who cuts where. Sometimes you want no bits or strings of that person at all and even though you're breaking up with them you sacrifice yours. At first you miss that person. The end of the relationship means that you will not have that person in your life anymore. It feels bitter but after a while you can let go and you can accept that this person is not in your life anymore, and there's a void you feel; this void can easily be filled by other things.

But there's a different kind of void that is much harder to fill, it's that part of you they took with them that you can't find. What you were missing all along is yourself and you didn't even realize. That's why not just the relationship falls apart, but other aspects of your life too, because the part that's missing, that has been taken away from you is part of how you dealt with the rest of the world and not just this person. That's why the blow makes your whole world collapse. I think that you'd need to regenerate that part of you that you lost before you can become normal again, but it is not necessarily a bad thing because that new part of you has the chance to grow into a much better part than that which existed before.

Forbidden Fruit

A believer is always the better choice. Aside from the many positive benefits it has when things get rough there's one greatly overlooked benefit. The sin is always so much sweeter when it's a sin. People who don't believe in anything can't see many pleasures as wrong and can never taste the sweetness of the forbidden fruit.

Delusional

I've been told lately by two people that I'm delusional, but in my defence I think that they're both very delusional. It makes sense that we view each other this way since our notion of the world doesn't match. The fact of the matter is that we can both be right about each other, but it's also a fact that we can't both be wrong about each other.

I Found My Strenght Later In Life

I found my strength later in life. As a child I was always respectful to authority and did things as a child should do. I didn’t say 'no' much and I learnt my lessons well. They were the lessons that all children were taught, to be respectful to authority and pass the tests they gave you with good grades. That’s not to say that even as a young child I didn’t show signs of what I am now, on my first day of school I kicked the teacher and only became friends with her when she gave me a chocolate and treated me nicely. Later on I defied my teachers outside the classroom where I thought they had no power over me. But when requested to do things in the classroom I never questioned them and I was innocent and perhaps even naïve not to even think about what was within their boundaries to ask me; like certain donations or certain fees, it was just so much pressure not to be like everyone else. There was no real thinking and just instincts and lessons learnt.

But that’s how children should be; obedient and smart and able to take in all that they’re being taught. The real trouble is that sometimes this is all that people learn, and there are many more schools other than ones with teachers and classrooms, but no one pays much attention. Real life has a school of its own that you graduate to after having learnt those lessons in elementary school. Real life teaches you to find your strength and it tells you something that seems contradictory to what you’re taught before, it tells you that you have the right to say no and to choose when to listen to what you’re being told. I was a good student of both schools and that’s why, after having learnt all the rules, I learnt when I could break them.

It’s not that I’ve changed, I’ve just developed. College was marked with defiance and voicing out my cases. I wasn’t doing it to get attention or to prove that I could say no, but the lessons I got from real life were equally balanced by those I got from school. I found my strength when I combined both of these lessons and decided to apply them.

Sometimes the problem is that people stop learning. School spoon feeds you so much and when you pause to be spoon fed again, you pause indefinitely. There’s more to life than school. As a child I didn’t possess much thought or doubt about anything, I wasn’t defiant to most things that came across my way. I did not possess strength. Strength came much later in life, when I paused and realized that what I learnt was not enough, what I learnt was not adequate and what I learnt would not get me through. I was sick of being timid and without character, and I was tired of not finding any love or respect. I didn’t blame people though, I blamed myself because I didn’t deserve their love and respect. I looked inside me for those and only found my strength when I found them.

Chaos

Chaos. That's what this life is, following a pattern that we just don't want to accept. We're so insistent on seeing a pattern in our minds that we forget that it only happens in our head. We only read in books about the good endings and the great logic of a story, but we see a section of a story, we don't know what's before and what's after. Life's pattern is chaotic but we continue to seek a non existent justice and we have a non existent sense of fairness. Our idea of fairness and justice is linear, sort of discrete where one end should weigh like the other. Why do we insist on seeing things differently? Because of those very rare times in life that things have turned out like we see in books?

If I absolutely had to choose, I'd rather have a cult following than be extremely famous.

Endure

Endure the cold harsh days that offer you no hope, for with endurance your whole soul sublimes and nothing can take away that stand you made to defy the world and take it on by force. The whips you feel from who knows where, they sting you and you search for where they came from and who to fight, but with every time you turn, your back is lashed again. What way to fight those lashing whips but to endure and tell the world you may take my skin but my muscles still remain, you may take my muscles but my bones will endure.

It's easier to talk than to do and like the famous poet said, advice is easy to give for one who has not been afflicted, but for one who has, he has to bear his misfortune and bear the high horsed advice that people give him.

Relentless are those attacks that take you on by storm and leave you not to rest and leave you with much scorn. How much can you fend off from that worldly wrath you have to bear and how can one bear it when facing it alone. How much can one endure when many friends disperse at hardships at every fork in the road until you have too little of them standing beside you for support, and some return to stab you and kill what's left in you. Et tu Brutus and Brutus was the world who you once thought your friend and with the 'r' dropped it became a fiend. Such a deceitful word this fiend, it looks like a friend so close and yet it lacks what makes a friend, that 'r' that stands for reliable, dropped and so is it with a friend if not reliable turns to fiend.

But endure, lest your only friend, yourself be turned against you and forsake you.

Warn me

Warn me if my posts are ever:

Preachy
Pretentious
Boring
Knows-it-alls
Self indulgent
Whiney
Acting wiser than they are
Pathetic
Nonsense
Wrong
Silly
Stupid
Clichéd
Old News
Arrogant
Preposterous
Obsessive
Crude

or just plain uninteresting..

More to Say

There's nothing to be said that hasn't been said as yet, but there's always more to say. There's always a different ear to every thought which words that have been spoken before can't reach. There are always ways that the world has changed that force us to say the truths in different notes and tones. Truth comes close to beauty in one sense, just like the word beauty is one to describe what is pleasing to the eye, the way it pleases changes over time. A woman's desired shape changes across the timeline of man, and changes from eye to eye. The color of skin, the color of the hair, their preference changed from place to place.

So it is with truth. Truth is that which is pleasing to the soul, and from place to place, it differs how that truth is told and needs to be told. In places with science it needs to be told in formulas and in places with spirit it needs to be said with spirit. The spiritual man won't believe science and the scientific man won't believe the spirit. The truth is one, but it needs to be told differently, it needs to be told and told again... it's always forgotten and needs to assure its recipients constantly of it's existence.

Extremes

"The atheist thinks he's a courageous lone rationalist in a world full of superstitious savages. The religious fanatic thinks he's the lone standard bearer of truth in a world full of unbelievers. Or he thinks of himself grimly trudging though life carrying his assigned yoke and resenting all the slackers around him who have it so easy."

~Steve Dutch

Vocabulary

A vocabulary of thoughts is more important than a vocabulary of words.

It's When

It's when you compromise and watch a movie that you don't like or that you've seen before for the sake of your friends who want to see it, but then when you want to watch a movie that you're really keen on seeing no one around wants to compromise. It's when you go to a place you despise but accept going only because it's just a meeting ground and those you've chosen to meet won't budge a centimeter to meet you somewhere that's slightly not to their taste. It's when you drive all the way across the city in the worst of traffic only to have your friends stand you up, ask you to come another day and pretend there's nothing wrong with that. It's when you choose to stay in a football game you despise because there's not enough people and if you leave the teams will not have an equal number of players while others threaten to leave just to get things done their way. It's when you're there for people during their hard times and their troubles and you stick around patiently trying to find out what's wrong with them and help them and support them but when you're feeling slightly off they just leave you alone completely just because they haven't been used to taking care of you. It's when you put up with so much crap from your friends about things that are very trivial and they make a point that it's not acceptable but when you apply the same principle they've forced on you to them they pretend like you've wronged them fully. It's when you're willing to let go of certain preferences at times but you're expected to let go of them all the time because that's what they're used to. It's when you give and don't receive and you're expected to keep giving. It's when your generosity and good will is abused.

That's when you ask 'Why Should I?' and calmly decide that the side of you that's uncompromising, ruthless and decisive needs to shine having been kept on a leash for long because it shouldn't be that way with those we care about.