Up & Down

Sometimes I am doing okay.
Sometimes I'm not doing okay.

The times I'm doing okay is when I feel okay.
When I have a thin thread of confidence.
When I have a little bit of hope.

The times I'm not doing okay is when I'm slammed
with all these sh*tty feelings.
Of feeling deeply flawed, inadequate, insecure.
When I have very little confidence or hope.

Sometimes I think that my blocks are illusions
even though they feel very real.
My reactions to my blocks are very real.
But nobody likes feeling sh*tty.

I am where I am because of my choices
and failing to make choices.

By choosing what I've chosen,
I've also chosen not to choose other choices.
And yeah, I've made sh*tty choices.

I'm not the greatest at making great choices.
I chose to become an alcoholic
by not taking responsibility for my issues.
By using alcohol to supress my emotions.
It seemed to work, but not to my benefit.

Did the benders teach me to believe in myself?
Liquid courage isn't the same as real courage.

I was trying to explain to someone that fear is a tool.
To help us build courage.
It can also be used as a weapon to keep us from being courageous.
To keep us scared little cowards who never move forward.

Have I been a coward? Have I been scared? YEAH.
I'll admit to being a coward, to cowering in fear.
To being so damn scared of failing that guess what? I failed.
How is that even surprising? It isn't.

Do I want to be brave? YEAH.
Would most of my problems be solved
if I was brave enough to solve them? On my own?
Without wishing someone would hold my hand
through the hardest decisions?

I'll tell you what it is, where it comes from.
It comes from when we are kids and we don't
have the 'power' to make our own decisions.
And our decisions are made for us.
Whether we like it or not
and there isn't anything we can do about it
because someone else is in charge
and they get to call the shots. We don't.

The fear comes from not knowing
what the result will be from the decisions we don't get to make.
Being at the mercy of other people's decisions.
That hopelessness that they get to make them, we don't.

So we learn a sense of powerlessness and fear.

And a lot of the time, those decisions that do affect us,
are really f*cking poor decisions.
So we don't learn to make good decisions
from people who make sh*tty decisions.

All that sh*t from our childhood follows us
into our teen years and our adulthood.

Except that when we are adults, we get to call the shots.
We spend most of our lives not being allowed to
To suddenly being allowed to.
But we don't learn how to.
Otherwise we would know how to.
And we'd just make all those good decisions.
And we wouldn't still be affected somehow
by all the sh*tty decisions everyone has made.

All the sh*ttiness from how we were raised will follow us.
And we have to unlearn all the sh*ttiness we have learned.

So that we can become functional adults.
When a lot of people have never seen what a functional adult looks like.
A lot of people never had that when they were growing up.

But we can't blame our sh*ttiness on their sh*ttiness.
It's just a pattern that follows us. That's all it is.

Not everything we learn is needed
and we don't always learn what we need to.
Because we aren't always taught what we need to know.

Especially when the adults in our lives are alcoholics.
And that isn't our fault.
Even though, when we are kids, most things feel like our fault.
And that just adds to the feeling
of feeling inadequate.

But how can we fault ourselves for others deciding something
that hasn't got anything to do with us?
The only reason it has anything to do with us
is that it affects us.
Otherwise, it's their decisions.

For an example: When an adult in our lives loses their sh*t
and they don't see any consequence for that adult
for losing their sh*t. They think it is okay to lose their sh*t.
That it is okay for the adult and that it is okay for them.

And they think that the fear is a tool, not a weapon.
So to be an authority figure, in their minds
is about losing their sh*t.
And they learn why they lose their sh*t
and think that's what happens when they have those 'reasons.'

I can speak on this because I was abused as a kid.
By people who lost their sh*t constantly.
And by the time I was a teenager, I had an "anger problem."
I wanted to break things and express my anger in lots of ways.
Lots of very sh*tty, unhealthy ways.
But that is all that I knew.

I didn't know that anger was really a mask for other things.
Like hurt, pain, frustration, disappointment...
Grief just became anger.

And trying to control my emotions just meant suppressing them.
Because what else could I do?
Even if I cried, I'd be given "something to cry about."
So why express anything at all?

And it got to the point that I wasn't afraid to get hit anymore.
I actually thought it was f*cking normal.
I didn't know that I was being abused. I didn't know it was abuse.
When I was much younger than that, there was fear.
When I was very young. And fear was their tool and their weapon.
So I started seeing it as a weapon, something to be afraid of.

As I got older, I was less and less afraid, but the memories
of being terrified stayed with me and kept me down
for so much of my life and I held myself back
and held myself down for most of my life.
I became my own abuser without realizing it.

It wasn't something that I fully healed from.

Yet I find it easier to forgive ignorant people for their ignorance
because they are so ignorant that they don't realize
how ignorant they actually are.

It wasn't until they no longer had a direct influence on me
that I was able to see past their ignorance and my own.

But at the same time it's so hard to convince anyyone
that you've been ignorant towards that you see the light.
Because if you can see the light, why were you so ignorant?
Why did you make them and let them suffer
due to your ignorance?

And the answer is that it is because you were suffering
due to your own ignorance.

Sometimes we know that we are, and other times we are so ignorant
that we can't see that we are.
So we blame our suffering on anyone and anything else.
Other than our own ignorance.

When ignorant people are in charge, it really feels hopeless.

But knowing and admitting that we are ignorant
can work for us because we realize that we have a lot to learn.
The sooner we realize that, the more time we have to learn
and the better chance we have at transforming our lives.

But we have to want that.
We have to want to stop hiding behind our ignorance like cowards.
But it's like people are glorifying ignorance.
"Ignorance is bliss."
Is it bliss if we are suffering because of it?

When we realize how much suffering was caused by our ignorance
Is that bliss? Only the ignorant don't 'care.'
They don't care enough to care about caring.
So are they careful? No. They are careless.
Without a care in the world.

But when you realize that you do care.
About how ignorant you've been, and the suffering of others
due to your ignorance. You start to worry.

Because you're too aware to keep being ignorant.
And you're aware that you've been trained and conditioned
to ignore your own sh*ttiness...
And by doing so, you never did anything about your own sh*ttiness.
Even though you wished others would do something
about THEIR sh*ttiness that affects YOU.
Ignoring your sh*ttiness and blasting others for theirs is pretty sh*tty.

All of our behavior is learned behavior.
It's conditioning. Which I will be writing about.
We can learn how to recondition ourselves.
But it really starts with how we think.

That's why going from pessimism to stoicism is a LEAP.
Because attitude affects mood.
But we act based on how we feel a lot of the time.
So if we have confidence and feel confident
it is more likely we will act.

If we feel insecure, we tend to react more than act.
And most people have hang ups. No doubt about that.
A lot of people will deny their insecuriies
Because they'd rather appear to be secure when they actually aren't.
Then they wonder why all these internal battles rage within them.

Maybe they are still fighting wars that already ended.
That could end any time that they declare that they are over.

Wars are about fear as a weapon, control, power...
Same with the internal battles.

People actually have the power to render themselves powerless.
Powerless over their addictions. Whatever the addiction is.
"Hopelessly addicted."
Well there was hope for me. I got out ahead of a couple of my addictions.
I can't say I did it completely on my own,
but mostly on my own.
I went to meetings, but that was it.
I didn't have the support of a partner. I was single at that time.
I had to sit with my feelings even though it didn't feel good.
Because all these sh*t feelings rise to the surface
that you were using alcohol to 'ignore.'
It feels so sh*tty that most people go back to drinking.
You have to really WANT to give it up. For good.
No matter how sh*tty the process seems or feels.
You have to WANT to claim your power to quit.
And it starts to feel less and less sh*tty.
It starts to feel good that you have the power over it
and that it doesn't have the power over you.

But at the same time, you need a new way
of dealing with sh*tty emotions
because you realized that your old way of dealing with sh*tty emotions
Is and was pretty sh*tty.

When it is accepted by the culture and society,
every sh*tty thing seems less sh*tty.
But doesn't make it less sh*tty.

There are two AA type meetings.
One is for the alcoholics and one is for those affected by them.
I've only been to the ones for alcoholics.
Even though I've been affected by alcoholism, too.
My abuser was and probably still is an alcoholic.

The thing is that alcoholics
can't see the immediate effects of their alcoholism.
Just like ignorant people can't see the immediate effects
of their ignorance.

Even though I've heard some alcoholics say:
"All I ever do is hurt people I love."
But they can't see how or why.

There is a lot of guilt and shame that comes up
when they finally see it.
And they want to run from that as well.
Because it feels sh*tty to admit how sh*tty you've been.
Especially to people you love and who loved you, too.

But seeing it means you can do something about it.
"What goes unacknowledged cannot be changed."
What we acknowledge can sometimes be changed.
But the key word in acknowledge is knowledge.

We can't know what we can't see.
But it's not like we are completely blind, either.