We fear what we don't understand; it follows that if you don't understand yourself, you will become very fearful of yourself.
Isn't it confounding when you do something that makes no sense? One time I had a couple whiskeys in me and I walked out of a bar wearing someone else's jacket.
It was totally on purpose; I just felt like stealing. I had plenty of money so there was no motive beyond stupidity.
Luckily, that night I was spared a punching (dude tore the jacket off my frame, stared at me hard, and went back inside). But that was just one of a hundred thousand fuck-ups that have defined the majority of my life.
I'm sure you can relate - no need for an AA meeting here.
Could it be that fucking up, over and over and over again, is in fact our crossed-wires reaction to impulses that we don't understand?
Do we attempt to destroy what we fear - what we cannot understand?
Ourselves?
The short answer, for me at least, is yes.
Once this uncomfortable truth was identified, it was clear what had to be done: I had to start the process of making peace with myself.
Only, I wasn't ready. It took a couple more years of suffering before I finally injured myself so badly that there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide any longer.
It took until I had literally no other options, until I was confined to a bed, flush with agony and stricken with narcotic emptiness, before I finally stopped... started to breathe... and raised my eyes to face my aggressor, my tormentor - myself.
Sorry, I know this is coming across a bit self-involved (a bit? ;) - Ed.), but it's a personal topic after all, not to mention I'm only starting to get this myself...
I hope that anyone who reads this understands that I need this for me too - I don't only write for people to read.
The journey to the center of my own existence was prompted by need...
I had been steadily taking 2 x 2mg Dilaudid pills, three times a day, to dull the pain of a severe injury.
Like any heroin, it didn't take long before the little pink bastards were no longer up to the task of fighting off the waves of deep, crushing pain that accompany a broken-and-reassembled femur.
In the basement, alone in darkness, I writhed like an animal...
I pleaded in desperation to an unknown God... I tried to sleep the remainder of my life away...
But there was no way out.
When I awoke from a 14 hour heroin-sleep, mentally and physically shattered...
When I awoke to find the beginnings of bedsores on my elbows, legs, back...
I fucking lost it.
In this moment, I realized the true, fundamental, nature of Human Existence:
Fight - or Die.
Adrenalin surged, my mind snapped taut. One thought overwhelmed: NO.
I surged upward, reached for my crutches, and maneuvered my way up to a hobbling stature, breathing through clenched and dirty teeth.
I stood, naked and broken, but not dead. I felt my heart pumping fluid and my brain calculating my balance. I felt my eyes sharpen to razors and my balls fill with blood.
No fucking way. Not like this.
I wanted to scream, to twist the steel crutches into wire, to rip my flesh off with my bare hands.
I hadn't known that I wanted to live - ever. Having never been faced with the rotting of my own facilities, the test had never been put to my Will to Live.
And when I had finally sunk myself so low, after years of pushing and pushing - I ran face-first into Nature's first command, wound deep and simple, hidden in a little box on a strand of DNA:
Live.
I stood, sweat-soaked and emaciated - and I Saw, for the first time.
I could see the knot in my bone, the one being carefully knitted by the army of benevolence that was - Is - my Body. I could see the crackling of the energy deep within the structure I inhabit, could feel the warm and assured hum of Healing - working, working.
I saw, finally, that it Loved me.
It had been with me since I was conceived, had spent untold kilowatts of cosmic power to design and grow me... to protect me from Death, ever in the wings... it had subverted callous bacteria and cunning viruses, led great armies, had fought and would continue to fight - to the very end - because it Loves me... Believes in me and my ability to do good, not bad...
And that was when I realized that I had never, ever loved myself.
