[several pages of the initial email deleted for my own reasons]
the remainder of an email I wrote today, after a very, very, difficult day. Addressed to Nicole, who is my world.
you aren't the only one scared of someone leaving you, or used to that. I lived in constant fear of being left in my only relationship, my own stupidity deciding that an open relationship is morally (yeah grand-standing podium me again...) acceptable and that platonic love, regardless of sexual adventures on the side will always triumph. Well, I was fucking wrong. And I want you to help me. [extremely personal parts removed]
today was a really hard day for me, emotionally, for you even more so. The fact that we made it through it together, I think shows us how much we care about each other. I made some fucking mistakes all through my life. I'm the classic person who always "patches things up" by telling white lies or outright lying. I don't want to get into how it started, it's Freudian bullshit memories, and mostly deals with how my father treated me in regards to wrongs I did (whether I did them or not), and somehow ingrained by the memories of my mother breaking into tears whenever I "broke the rules", or did "something bad", and I cannot stand someone falling apart like that, not my mother. I'm not close to her at all, but she's so sensitive, if you think I'm sensitive, she is ten times more, and growing up in an cloistered environment with the overprotective mother stereotype (but, many times worse than what an American mother might due, because of cultural differences), and with the regular beatings and name-calling I got from my father from whatever fucking ill-deeds he thought I committed, just, started the pattern. I remember one time, vehemently arguing that I did not do this time. He had just bought a trailer? (one of those things you put on the back of a truck for vacations), and I was there while he was at the people's place looking at it. And I noticed the ceiling was dented all to hell (on the top -- and it was metal), like severe hail damage or someone really going angry with a hammer and I nagged him and tried to say, the roof is messed up, but he shoved me, almost to the ground for interrupting "business" (I quickly learned to leave him alone if he was doing anything involved with money -- it was a quick route to physical discipline after the guest(s) had left). So I tried to tell him that I thought he was getting shafted, and I was what, 5 or something years? fucking innocent little kid, and little kids nag their parents all the time, but I rarely did, that was beaten out of me a lot younger, and I learned a fucked up American-Asian centric concept of what respect should be. Bullshit, I can all that, it's just an excuse to treat the weak like shit and take advantage of them, the wife, and the children conceived are just trash that should respect the father, and not dishonor the mother, and there was no room for tolerance. And...I was a really crazy kid, the most outgoing kid in school, at least in elementary, before most of that behavior had been whipped out of me. My father picked up a habit around that time of going outside and finding a nice sapling and setting it up on the dinner table and just leaving it there, as a visual warning. He had moved up from belts and two-by-fours to young saplings (they hurt more like a whip, than a thwack that a belt or two-by-four leaves, and he did it hard enough to make me bleed most times). So I grew up for a while in constant fear of that, placed right there, at the dinner table, forced to ignore it each night while I ate. Dinner was a silent affair. The children didn't speak, unless spoken too. Which wasn't often. I ate as fast as I could every night and dismissed myself to get away from that living nightmare. Anyway -- I've gotten off track about white lies and real lies. When my father bought that mobile trailer and brought it home, my uncle visited to admire it and noticed that the top of the thing was, hey, all fucking smashed up. So, the only suspect, of course, like they would question their own fucking stupidity, was me. I cried and cried, and I went through beatings and beatings saying I didn't do it. I fucking didn't do it. But that wouldn't work. They wanted a story, they wanted details, they wanted admission, they wanted the exact *way* I did it, and *exactly* why I did it. Eventually I caved in, I was so young, and I'm surprised I endured the 3 or 4 beatings they gave me while I cried I didn't do it. So I made up a story. It was a simple story, but it was hard to find a reason for me doing it that convinced them, they thought I was a fucking dimwit and any ideas that actually made sense they rejected and I was beaten again. I was beaten several times because my reason for breaking the roof of the trailer wasn't believable to them. It was like torture. Nothing I could say, the truth wouldn't work. I tried and tried until I couldn't do it. So I made up their fucking story, and got beaten for each step of the story. When I admitted I did it. I got beaten. When I said how I did it (they wanted to know how a little kid could manage to do it), I said I climbed up the side ladder with a wooden mallet hammer at night and banged on the roof over and over. Then they wanted a reason. First I said I was mad at my dad. That didn't work. They wanted to know why I was mad. fucking idiots, there was a million reasons why I could be mad at my dad. I don't quite remember the bullshit answer I came up with, I think it had to do with them catching me stealing a bouncing ball at a toy store a few months back and I wanted revenge (like a kid that little could even envision the idea of revenge. Well they taught me the idea at a young age, and I think revenge is a concept that comes later in life, certainly not to someone as young as I was). So I learned revenge, and I used it. I fucking used it. I did everything that would accept my mom (mostly making my room dirty by throwing fits and pulling dressers over and knocking down lamps and basically doing anything that would accomplish the most destruction that left the most shit on the floor (that was the worst thing somehow, stuff on the floor). Anyway she cried and couldn't understand why I did it, and I couldn't respond, I was scared to say, because I'm angry at my father, because all she would do is just cry. It was impossible to get her to side with me, as with the American-Asian centric view, her husband is always right, regardless of her own feelings towards me. It tore me apart to see her cry when she knew that I had *at least a little bit of a point* in things, and to see me get hurt, whipped, beaten, humiliated, and she'd cry while it happened, hysterical and leave the room if it happened in the same room that she was in. So I learned to be a bad person in school, learning what a fun thing rage was, and now I had grades. That gave me fucking power. I was supposed to be brilliant, smart, successful, I was the first son, and they expected me to fulfill that duty. Well fuck them. I made sure all my grades were as low as possible, which was really hard cause I liked homework. (yeah it's fucking true - I was a dork from the start, I liked school). But I expressed my rage and frustration other ways, by lighting backpacks on fire (in those days in elementary school we all hung our bags outside the classroom on racks, so it was easy to unzip a bag and toss in a flaming match and hope a notebook or something would catch fire. I wasn't quite smart enough to figure out that I should be lighting paper and tossing that in. I liked school, but I wasn't brilliant. I've told you some of these stories of elementary in pieces, but this kind of relates it, at least in some mish-mashed timeline way of things, and how it came to be and progressed. I pissed on the boy's bathroom wall, god that punishment fucking sucked. I had to clean the bathrooms for who knows how many weeks, after school, and the stench of cleaner and piss really gave me a real disliking for dicks because they all fucking miss the urinal, so who the fuck cares if I miss it completely and piss on the wall and laugh like a maniac and shout. What's the difference? As far as I see it (and still do), there is no fucking difference. Public bathrooms are, well, America's shithole, and we treat them with shit and no respect. I didn't know that I was doing something wrong, I knew I was doing something "not right", but I really had no sense of right or wrong, except for what would for sure get me in trouble with my dad, or what I could get away with. At that time through elementary, I had two moral viewpoints, the first was, I'm going to get fucking beaten if I do this, and the second was, I *might* get away with this. That was pretty much as far as it went, every action I did, was based on if I could get away with it and know that I was inflicting pain to my father in some karmic way, like some kind of payback for all the hurt he did to me, taken out on society. I didn't hate people at all, I just hated...life, structure, and everything. And school was my playground to give payback to my father, by getting U's (insufficient) or S's (sufficient), but no, uh well whatever meant better than sufficient, I never got those. I always got a whipping for each report card, and a lecture on each grade and a detailed report was wanted from me for why I failed yet again and did so pitifully and got such a grade. I mostly shrugged and said, 'I dunno'. That wasn't, really, the best answer, but it pissed him off the most. Anyway, god, I don't know where I was going with this. I just sat down to type you a letter about meeting, and somehow it got long and way off-topic. I wanted to somehow explain how my early life made me feel forced to tell white lies, because in some situations the truth was not accepted by my dad, and how those things turned into blatant full-out lies, because nothing else would stop the hurt, nothing else would stop him, and he didn't want the truth. He didn't want me to say I fucking hated him, that I fucking wished he was dead, that I fucking blamed him for all my problems (yeah - classic, but I did), and all that fucking shit. And he didn't want me to tell him why I felt this way, oh no, if I even tried to explain it, those were the worst beatings at all. Finding fault in my father, is a major mistake, he has no faults, and to attempt to point out one... Well then his rage shows. I guess it comes in the family.
I've calmed my rage, through high school, I learned to adapt, be pacifist, chameleon, blend in, to avoid the taunts and schoolyard beatings that I saw other people, just like me, but not quick enough to learn the right words to say, or the right way to act, to be labeled queer or weird or just strange. I learned quick, I was pretty fucking smart by high school, at least in manipulating people into what they thought of me. And I'm fucking crying that I said that. It's not a thing to be proud of, but learning how to manipulate my father, was the first thing I learned to stop the torrent of hurt from him, and after that, everyone else just came easy. High-school kids were so transparent, so caught up in their day-to-day bullshit, that I was almost never picked on, and if I was I was rescued in minutes by people of all groups, usually the cool girls though. They thought I was cute cause I was so damn shy, shaking and stumbling around all the time and dropping shit and my voice cracking, it's good to know that my first real confrontation with day-to-day social phobia had a positive effect. Blah.
I fucking hate men, by the way. And I'll never trust one, and never let one close to me, or get close to my emotions. I'm too scared of them. Every guy I walk by, I shiver inside and am scared of the hurt that he might be capable of. All because of one male figure in my life, I distrust an entire gender and categorically place them as a simulacrum of my father waiting out there to hurt me. That was the root of my social phobia, I couldn't exist outside my house in high-school and post high-school without a friend with me. I trusted one male, that I knew from elementary through high school. We never really talked, I didn't know how to talk them, other than simple grunts and affirmations or shrugs. My most used fast was 'I don't know', it's really amazing how fast someone will leave you alone if you simply repeat that, especially with your head down... John parker was his name. When I came back to Colorado, I tried in vane to find him again. His parents separated long ago, during middle school years. And I had no luck tracking him down in my hometown (Longmont) or the last place I knew that his mother lived (Fort Collins). I've come to fear that he might of killed himself. He was bipolar because people knew what the fuck bipolar was. He was on lithium in middle school and high school. I didn't even know what it was for, until he told me about one of his suicide attempts and numerous times hospitalized. I felt awkward, and couldn't...tell him that I felt like dying a lot. It really hurt me, that I couldn't tell my only friend, closest friend, something so simple. That such simple communication I lacked, because avoiding communication was the best way in life to avoid conflict, and resulting hurt. I wish I had known how to converse then. I really fucking miss john. He accepted me, didn't ask me why I was so silent, didn't ask me questions, didn't think I was weird. He just hung out with me, didn't give reasons, just accepted me.
And I haven't found that kind of pure acceptance since. Everyone has their own agenda, he didn't. He just lived day-to-day, that was his agenda, that and where could he get more pot. A simple life and no demands or desires or what the fuck over on me, it was okay to just be... me, even if his other friends thought I was strange, he didn't care. God I wish I still knew him.
I've lived my whole life trying to meld myself into what I thought people would like the most. It's so fucking natural that it takes very strong effort *not* to start to style myself after what I think someone wants. It's so fucking hard. It's so fucking hard to stop that desire to please everyone, and be 100 personalities in one, one for each person, custom matched as best as my mind could figure out. At least I stopped that, at least I figured out that people, in general, are shit, and aren't worth my sympathy and aren't worth that twisted devotion I gave anyone who showed the smallest hint of appreciating the bullshit fake me I made for them. fuck them. fuck their agenda's. fuck them all. It took me a long time to move past that phase, after I learned how to communicate, probably sometime in my early 20's. So long, so long to learn such simple skills that a loving mother and father would naturally show their own son or daughter through affection, that they wouldn't need to *learn* things that are considered human. I'm a freak, and I'm not really even human, I just try to pass off as one, but I ring so hollow when people get close. Close to what? I don't know what is beneath my outside, because that's all I've been for my lifetime.
I haven't developed a self, I developed selflessness out of the cruelty I saw inflicted by people on the ones they love, every day, starting with my own father. It felt right. It felt good. To devote myself to what I felt was true altruism, and it was almost a religion for me, it felt so right inside after all that I had been through.
I have a really hard time, placing myself before others, and trying not to tear myself apart at the expense of other people. It's such a natural feeling inside me, that I feel so fucking wrong, when I try to feel for myself, to completely feel, without strings or attachments or disclaimers. It's a really scary feeling and I don't like it, but I know it's something I'm going to have to get through if I'm ever going to be able to reciprocate to someone, to not only be altruistic, but reach what I feel is... good, reciprocal altruism, maybe that's my idea of love and of friendship too. Don't ask, don't take, just give what you have to give. But, I'm flawed, and I can only give so much and the other person, like you, give more, and are hurt because I can't share more, because I can't show you what I feel inside. I don't know what I feel inside, I'm scared to look inside. I'm scared to let a self develop, or let whatever stunted little runt of a self I might have from my childhood before I learned that life isn't about smiling. It's about tears and nightmares and staying under the covers, because monsters can't get you. I don't know who I am, and I have feelings, emotions, and other things, but whatever they are tied to inside, are vague things that I can't even describe or figure out, I know most of what I am is because of my life and the life I went through. That's all I know. But, the inner core, that a person always has, from the beginning...I'm really scared that mine has been killed, like some cancer ate it away while I grew up disillusioned, slowly losing myself, to sacrifice it for the pity, attention, empathy that I could get. I'm afraid that there might be nothing inside me, and I really am a shallow asshole, who pretends to be a good person, but fucks everyone over in the end. I can't find anything to really say no, that isn't me. There's no inside that says, Allen, you know that's not true. There's no voice that tells me that what I just said is plain wrong. There's no voice inside.
and it scares me to hell.
