“I’ll never be anything but what I’ve been. My only hope is to be enough things for that total equation to balance out, somehow, for the shit side of the scale to tip somehow. Sometimes, when I see someone else being singled out for derision or ridicule, it doesn’t matter to me if they deserve it…I lash out anyway. It’s wrong to mock, my soul screams, it’s wrong and fuck anyone who does it. Try mocking me, you bastards. Try it now. Then there are times where that resolve twists, like a knife with a mind, and cuts back in on itself and I mock myself, mock those who I in my somehow infinite disdain consider even worse than myself (and that’s pretty damn bad) and then hate myself more for having fallen down the rabbit hole of hate.”
That’s a very thought-provoking link. We go through life with our true selves hidden to avoid conflict, and individuality disappears like yesterday’s weather.
my recommendation is, if you ever want your thoughts provoked, go read Ezrael. i consider him the philosopher for our times. not something to be done lightly, you go there with the intent of expanding your consciousness.
i hope that he, or someone, is archiving this stuff for the future. i’d volunteer if that’s not being done.
Very thought provoking read. I think it is sad that he seems to have such negative feelings about his childhood. As I commented at his site, I feel that our childhood experiences impact heavily on what we become as adults. If you have no pleasant childhood remberances, I think that adult life can be quite miserable for an individual. It most definitely will affect the way that you interact with others. I hope he is capable of trying to look at life and others in a more positive light. Though he seems to have pretty negatve ideas about what happened to him early on as a child, he should not use this to judge the world and make him feel that everything/all around him behave this way. Life and people are not all negative, there are good people and positive experiences in this life. I think I’ve had some good people in my life and I hope it continues. Hope he may be able to have some of these himself.
jesus. that was hard to read. (in a really amazing way)
stacey, your comment there, “The true self gets whittled away piece by piece, bit by bit, until we resemble everybody else, and only then can we fit into society without conflict,” very concisely put. never thought about this in quite this way. I like.
now I wonder how much of a bullshit artist I am. I don’t necessarily think that the true self has to be abandoned, but I definitely hide it in certain circumstances. what about that one philosophy where we have many different character selves and we bust out the appropriate ones for different situations? can’t there be a core individual that is always there but self-monitors? not that I think one should have to do this, and I hate that I do it, but it helps us “fit into society without conflict.”
A philosopher is the perfect word to describe Ez, kd.