My Truth

It's 7:00am on Sunday morning and I want to scream.  I want to scream until my throat gurgles with blood.  I want to punch walls.  I want to escape this fucking unnamable turmoil that lives inside of me.  Sometimes it lies dormant, but at this moment it yearns for expression.

I realize now that the turmoil I feel is not unnamable anymore; it does have a language, even if these words on the screen feel like a gross joke, the far-off ripples of a whirlpool of self-destruction that's trying to suck me down while laughing maniacally about it.  But I won't let it take me, no, fuck that.

This turmoil I have inside of me has a language because other people speak about it and have spoken about it.  Others who look similar to me, and others who seem completely different.  I know this because I took part in the March to End Rape Culture yesterday.

For perhaps an hour yesterday, my voice joined hundreds of others, chanting, marching with people from all walks of life, reverberating off the buildings of Center City into the ears of hundreds or thousands as we commanded the streets, demanding to be heard.  What an empowering thing.

So in the spirit of the March and with the courage to speak my truth still with me, I am going to share my story of sexual abuse.

I am now quite certain that at the age of five or six I endured some sort of sexual trauma.  I don't remember the actual event or events, but I believe it was a teacher, a neighbor or perhaps both, who were the perpetrators.

The insidious thing, and the reason I feel I'll never have the language to exactly describe the deeper feelings around this is that I don't actually remember the event or events.  I was five or six with no conception of what sex actually was.  The events could have been physical in nature or they could have been verbal; I may never know.

What clued me into this is a specific memory of trying to communicate "something" to my parents and receiving a strong reaction of panic and fear.  I said some words to my parents and my parents reacted strongly out of concern.  "What happened?  What happened?  Tell us!!!!"  Incongruence, confusion, panic, fear.  What did I do wrong?

I shut down.  I didn't understand what was happening.  I was trying to say this thing and now my parents are freaking out.  My voice is lost.  I can't say the words.  I don't understand why their reaction to my words is so strong.

Nothing ever came of it.  There was nothing to go on, no words to say to implicate anyone.  Life went on and I was a decent kid.  I didn't act out, I didn't get into trouble.

This memory was buried except in moments of drunkenness.  I'd get drunk in college and start balling on friends' dorm room beds, much to their confusion and consternation, and mine as well.

I apparently shared this secret with a couple of close friends over the years while drunk, that I believed something happened to me as a child, but I have no memory of this.  When sober, this memory didn't exist, it was not accessible.

When I was 27, I had what I affectionately call a psychotic awakening.  And what was the memory that popped up several hours before I lost my shit and landed in a psych ward?  The memory of trying to communicate that something happened to me but having no words to express it.

I recovered from my mental break and life went on.  Until my life unraveled again and I found myself once more on the brink of mental collapse.  And what was there at the bottom of it?  That good old memory, the communication, the strong reaction, the confusion of it.  Except this time when it popped up, I got whiffs of other things.

Walking down the hall hand-in-hand with a teacher in kindergarten or first grade, apparently going to take some sort of test.  Sunlight streaming through the windows of a classroom, alone with someone else, reading Frog and Toad.  There are no faces or names.  Fragments, fragrances.

This time when these memories surfaced, the realization that I had endured sexual trauma was also there.  It's like, wait a second, wait a second, what is this, what is this?  And then it all made sense for a moment:  all of the pain and internal turmoil I couldn't name, it made sense.  It had a name, and that was sexual abuse.  I am a survivor of sexual abuse.  It all added up, the psych ward, the near-psychotic state I was in at the time, churning in my head, all of the evidence, it all clicked.  And then I died.

Everything I knew to be true was a farce.  All of my life from the age of five or six was in some ways false.  I was living under false pretenses.  My frame of reference shifted and I could see clearly, if only for a moment, the truth of my life, the truth that the near-psychotic bed-ridden person with this realization was the same human as the one that at five or six experienced something which no language could describe.  There was continuity.

My life up to that point was disconnected.  A series of disconnected moments.  Drunken reveries the night before turned into dismal hangovers the next day.  There was a free side to me only accessible through substances and then there was the mundane side to me that went to work, but the two were not connected.  The continuity blew through all of that, blew through the walls that separated the disconnected moments and now my 27 year-old self was, underneath it all, the same as my six year old self.  And so my mental conception of myself died, at least temporarily, and my life since that moment has been a back-and-forth wave of transcendence and plunging back into the muck of the mental conception and pain.

While writing this I feel the strong need to exonerate my parents in some way and that doesn't feel quite right.  Exoneration can lead to or be a form denial.  So I don't want to exonerate them, nor do I want to blame them.  I want to simply state what happened to me and my experience of it.  I've talked to my parents about this over the last few years and our relationship has improved, but it has been a difficult process.  At the end of the day, I love my parents and have empathy for their side of this experience.

So who do I blame?  Who do I exonerate?  That's a tough one.  I can't really blame my perpetrators because I don't know who they are.  I don't remember.  That's probably why a lot of the rage I feel is directed at the general level of things, towards society and towards God and existence.  I have a lot of existential grief.  I've also realized that blame doesn't really accomplish anything.

Participating in the March to End Rape Culture and Take Back The Night earlier this year has made me aware of two things.  The first is that we live in a culture that is deeply damaged, that has a rampantly unhealthy attitude towards sex.  The second is that I have a voice to share my truth.  Sharing my truth, living it is the only thing that I can do because I know the other option is denial, which leads to self destruction, which leads to going crazy if taken far enough.

And I haven't even really touched on the shame I've felt and the grief this has caused me.  I'd like to explore the topic of shame in future posts, but for now I will say that if you've experienced some sort of sexual trauma, then you understand what I am speaking of here.  If you've experienced it yourself, or know someone who has experienced it - which, statistically speaking, is likely - then you know.

There was a speaker at the March yesterday, Ronald Savage, a hip hop producer, who recounted his experience of being molested by Afrika Bambaataa.  The message that stuck with me was this: when you're ready to tell someone about what happened to you, then share it when you're ready.

Know that there are others who have experienced sexual trauma; there is strength in that knowing, there is strength in that admission and acceptance.  Like a chant developing in a crowd, one person's voice may not be heard.  But one person steps out and offers their voice and soon others around them add their voices and eventually a hundred, a thousand voices are commanding attention, strong, reverberating, undeniable.  And that's hugely empowering.  That's when change happens.

Don't Quit Your Day Job, But If You Do...

I was sitting at the dining room table one morning three years ago, pre-spring rays piercing the blinds, cat on the windowsill, when a peculiar feeling struck me: I didn't have to work anymore, not in the way society would have me work.  I didn't need this career any longer.  I could pursue music.  It's now or never.

I called my boss immediately, almost on a whim, and explained that I wanted to pursue music and that I was quitting.  The decision to quit came in one instant.  I knew this was the correct path for me, I knew it in my bones, even though the "how" and the "what" of my decision was as opaque as the walls around me.  I also knew it was irrational.

I had no plan whatsoever beyond jettisoning my job.  Life at the time was good on paper: I had a well-paying career, money in the bank, a long-term live-in relationship, a solid collection of instruments, a solid group of friends.  But I was miserable.

My boss, surprisingly, was quite supportive of my decision, relating to me a story of a military general who, upon reaching the shores of enemy territory, decided to burn the boats they'd come in: if there was no chance of going back, then the only option was victory.  I thought it a fitting metaphor and felt inspired by the support.

The job itself was good on paper, but it was soul-sucking, and it seemed at the time to be the reason I couldn't create music: I was so mentally burnt at the end of the day, having ten or so people under me on the org chart, having a demanding client, and traveling every so often, that there were no resources left to expend on creativity.  I had all the equipment I needed to make music and I was in several bands at the time.  And yet, when it came time to sit down and write or record a song, I couldn't seem to do it.  Actually, that's not entirely true: sometimes a creative window would open.  But it felt like the window was either open or shut and I had little control over its state.  When the creative window was open, I was fully aware of the fact that it would soon close and so necessarily raced against the ticking clock to get something out.

One thing I knew could open the creative window were substances.  Alcohol, weed, whatever.  I mean, this is how I would unwind, how I could let go enough to write songs: go to the local bar, get decently drunk, smoke a few bowls, then pick up my guitar.  Most of the songs I wrote during that period were written nearly instantaneously.  If I could get enough of the thing out while the window was open, then the song would exist as-is, as it appeared at the time, with little need for edits.  It was more improvisation than actual songwriting.  Once the window was shut, however, that was it, there was no turning back, no revisiting the song, for the creative spark had vanished.

Writing music was an issue for me at the time, but so was performing.  I couldn't understand why, if I'd been playing music in some form for over half of my life, I couldn't seem to perform in front of others, or even play with others without a huge mental trip.  I could play just fine on my own, but the minute other eyes or ears were in the room, my body shut down.  I couldn't seem to fully control my muscles.  Any eye contact while playing would, and still does, derail me.  

At the time I thought it was my job that was the issue.  Quit my job and I'll have the mental and temporal resources to make and perform music.  Except I soon learned it wasn't the job that was the obstacle: it was myself, some unquantifiable force that was preventing me from expressing my internal music.  And then a series of events happened which blew my life apart.

A few months after quitting, my girlfriend broke up with me and moved out.  And then the drummer in our band died a month or so after that.  And then I seriously broke my dominant arm in a biking accident with no health insurance a couple months after that.  And then I realized a few months later while recovering that I had, in fact, endured some sort of sexual abuse when I was a child.  I felt like I had died.  Everything I knew to be true up to that point was a mirage.  I had zero self-worth.

And it goes even deeper than that.  I haven't quite figured out how to write about this aspect of the last few years, but for now I will say that I discovered a, shall we say, tantric side to my sexuality that, when combined with weed, allows me to enter and maintain profound mental states for weeks at a time.

So here I was, isolated, deeply broken mentally, but also deeply in touch with a more essential part of myself than any words could describe.

I started seeing a therapist and would show up at her office and ramble off coherent but manic theories about what was happening to me, and about life and society.  There was a lot of mental stuff to spin out.  I knew I was on the edge of sanity from prior experience, so I had an idea of how far it could go before I lost my shit.  Somehow I managed to keep my mind enough within the lines, but my therapist said she was "this close" to intervening at one point.

The thing about being in these far off states of mind is, how does one relate to others who have not been there themselves?  I could function enough on paper to pay my taxes and go to the store and do improv comedy, but I couldn't relate to anyone.  I didn't trust a soul.

I recently got the answer to this question through reading "Be Here Now" by Ram Dass.  It turns out there are other humans who have been "there."  I mean, here was a guy, highly educated, successful by the world's standards, who discovered there were other levels to existence by taking psychedelics.  In the first part of the book, Dass describes taking LSD consistently for three weeks straight.  Now here's someone I can relate to.

In his former incarnation, Ram Dass was Richard Alpert, Ph.D. and him and Timothy Leary and another guy wrote a book in the 60s called "The Psychedelic Experience," which is a guide for taking psychedelics based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Aha!!  Here it is, here is something that describes what I already know to be true.  I've been to these states, on psychedelics and otherwise, and now there's a language to this stuff I can understand, a map, a progression.

In fact, and maybe this is a fallacious way of looking at the world, but sometimes I tend to think that if you haven't been "there" - out of your head, totally merged with the energy of the larger thing, the beauty and terror of it - then you don't really "know." And if you don't "know," then how can we relate on that deeper level?  And I'm not even claiming I "know" anything here, just that there are levels of consciousness beyond the waking, everyday sort, beyond the drunken sort that this culture values, and, well, that exploring these states opens the famed doors of perception.  And once they're open, society starts seeming crazy and unhealthy and hard to relate to on a general level.

At one point, I started going to AA.  I thought, "Here are people who understand, who know about the other side of things."  Except I found it hard to relate there as well.  I couldn't get past the language of the thing and couldn't seem to connect beyond a certain level that always dealt with the substances and the 12-steps.  I just wanted some fucking human connection, you know?

While I think AA and other anonymous 12-step programs are valuable and helpful to some, the major issue I have with their total abstinence philosophy is that there's a denial of half of yourself, the non-sober half.  This may be for good reason: if you're so deep in the thing that you're destroying or have destroyed your life, then by all means, go to rehab, stop using the substances.  But for me, I understood the issue went beyond the substances; I was already aware of some of the deeper reasons for my destructive behavior.  It's just that in AA you gotta speak the AA language.  And I didn't find the language there to talk about sexual trauma.  I didn't find the language there to talk about my profound experiences of altered states and the value those had and continue to have in my life.

It's like if I know that these other states of consciousness exist within me but outright deny them, label them as "bad" or label myself as "defective," then I'm forever struggling against myself.  If there's anything I learned in the last few years it's that all perspectives are valid and valuable, including perspectives from other humans, including perspectives brought on by altered states of consciousness.

People have shitty things happen to them and end up using substances simply trying to manage the volcano of feelings that erupt inside them daily, trying to deal with circumstances they were thrown into simply by being born, trying to exist in a society that doesn't value those it deems "broken" or "addicted."  And that causes further pain and destruction in their life and for those around them.  And then you go to meetings and learn that you have "character defects" and that the only solution is a higher power you can choose for yourself but that most people seem to call God, and society around you continues to celebrate drunkenness, celebrate violence and greed, and now you're an outcast at social events having to explain that you don't drink, and why is that any of your fucking business anyway?

And so you give up your solution for living, you give up alcohol or whatever your thing is, and learn to live without it.  That part's great, serving others, even living sober, but there's always this part of you that knows it's there, the other states of consciousness.  The alcohol and drugs are simply vehicles.  The consciousness is your own.  It's right in front of you, it is you.  You know these states exists and to deny them is to deny part of yourself.  You know the option to enter these states is always there and that they do provide some value or else you wouldn't desire to put yourself in them in the first place, consequences be damned.  And if that's true, if there is value to these altered states, then there must be a way to obtain the value of these states in other ways, in healthier, directed ways that are not so clearly ambiguous as 12 steps, and that don't necessary prescribe mostly total abstinence from mind-altering substances, excluding caffeine and cigarettes.

Through all of this, the past three years, for all the lack of planning on my part, for following my intuition, for the pain I've felt and endured, I did pursue music.  In fact, it's been my lifeline.  I burned the boats, got deep with life and music was right there with me and for me.  After I broke my arm, I bought a ukulele because it was easier to play than guitar.  That uke and my cat were the only two things I trusted, that I could consistently rely on for a stretch.

And the thing is, as I wake up from the mania and ecstasy and terror and depression of the last three years, the music is still there.  And now I'm finding the strength within myself to share it with others and to play it with others again.  I understand why music is important to me and to society in general.  I understand its power to heal, to communicate, and the role it serves in life.  I have now what I didn't have three years ago the moment I quit my job: purpose.  I've found "The Why."  And you could say that the "why" is my "higher power" - it's the flow of life, it's the energy flowing within me and around me, it's the eye contact with others, the intimacy in sharing myself, it's the connections made.

After all this, I've learned that I am not defective.  I am not broken.  I'm a whole entity unto myself and only then just a connected part of a larger whole.  If I can understand music, then I can understand myself.  And so I will keep doing it, studying music, playing music, sharing it with others, as an offering to the larger thing.  I have a voice, I have been given talents, and so I will contribute what I can.

Two Perspectives on the Flow of Compassion

There have been several moments in my life where I've been keenly aware that the energy I put into the environment, the outside world, is reflected back at me, transformed in some way.

I'll share two of these experiences with you, both profound and life-changing.  The first involves a panic state and is contrasted by the second, which was and continues to be a state of love.

A couple years ago, I was visiting my best friend in DC for the weekend and had, for various reasons, been imagining myself as a single point of consciousness, a unity.  At some point (pun intended), while talking with my friend, I achieved that goal; I became a single point of consciousness, squeezed down and compact in the present moment and time.  I could still talk and move, see my body, but my body was only an external representation, the complex shape, of the singularity of light that was me.

It felt like all of my motions were not my own - that is, I had no independent existence.  I felt that the earth and the universe itself was in perfect balance and that the random unconscious scratching of an itch or the shifting of my body was the result of shifting around me, of my internal motions, and the connected motions of my friend, and the motions of people around me I couldn't see.  Everyone on earth was all shifting together in perfect harmony, silently mirroring each other in infinite, but related ways.  My individual self, this body, was a discrete, yet whole and continuous part of that larger continuous wave.  I felt like I was a coral in a clear blue sea.  Almost motionless, just gentle swaying of energy.

I woke up the next morning and my operating system was clear.  My mind had no content.  I was.  Then I was light.  Then I was the one seeing the light.  Then that light was differentiated.  Over the course of a couple of hours, I saw my mind construct its view of the world from nothing, the absolute beginning, from stillness to motion, from the gross to the granular, in a fractal, recursive, type of way.  I was terrified with joy.

Walking to the Metro that morning with my friend, we came upon some, for lack of a better word, strangers walking toward us, just run-of-the mill people you'd see everyday and walk past without a thought.  These people were aware of me and I was of them.  And then I saw the grid of my life as the literal configuration of other people within space and time, relative to my own position and motion in the moment, moment by moment.  And then the grid rotated and I felt my life take a different direction; I was walking at a slightly different angle through the grid, through the array of people and their motions and paths that present themselves to me in daily life.  The relative change in my position changed my connection to them.

Once my friend and I boarded the Metro, I could feel the last fragrance of the weekend on the passengers' eyes and the heavy fear of the nation in the headlines of the papers, as if the words and the strangers were inconsequential but the feeling was everything.  The people could have been anyone, the words, anything, appearing, as needed, upon looking.  It's not the words or the bodies that count, but the underlying energy of it all.  The single motion was flowing and I was a part of that in a continuous way.

To be merged is to be connected.  There is a flow to life, and if I am fully merged with life, connected with it, then there's just life, there's no individual, discrete "me."  There are eyes being contacted and heads turning, arms moving, people walking, all in one motion and each individual consciousness affects the overall flow and space of it.

We eventually made it to Union station and my friend and I said our goodbyes; I was now on my own in some sort of 4th Dimensional space.

I grab a snack and move to the gate.  I feel that I have created this world at some point in the way, way distant past.  After all, I just saw the whole creation of life from nothing a few hours ago.  I am God in totality and in continuity, but at this moment only a discrete portion of that energy.

I look into the eyes of a homeless woman and feel the depths of her despair.  I can't bear it, I look away.  I cannot recognize the reflection of my despair in her.  I feel responsible.  I have created this mess at some point.  The enjoyment of my life is her despair.   These are the types of thoughts that send you to the crazy house, I know this.

A line forms around me at the gate for my train back to Philly.  People move as separate, discrete particles of consciousness in the continuity of it all, continuously gliding from all directions to stick to the line forming around me, or to continue past, pulled by some other destination.

The line forms around *me*.  I am the center of my experience, the experiencer, that's what "I" am.  Yet I am aware that others are separate, also at the center of their experience and its all interconnected.  The only difference between me and the others in this moment is in terms of mental structures and corresponding physical orientation and motion in space and time, and in physical form.  We are all collectively the experience and the experiencing.

I am now the infinite loop between the past and the future.  I wrap back around myself from the past, over myself, through a dimension outside of space and time, around the present moment, and pull myself from the future.

There was another time I had this flow-of-life realization.  I was on an escalator on the Metro platform a few years earlier, right before I took a sojourn to psychotic awareness.  Standing with my friend, a different one, I turned my head and saw a continuous flow of energy move up the escalator, a flowing of and within the motions of the people around me, the turning of their heads, the scratching of their noses, the shifting of their bodies in response to the wave.  Now, at the time, I thought I had caused this wave, I felt like God but self-conscious of it.  I moved and it caused a ripple effect.  And in some ways I was correct.  But I was missing the other side of the thing, that the people behind me on the escalator were part of the flow and that I was part of the flow as well and that their motions affected mine as much as mine affected theirs, just standing and talking with my friend.

If I take a look at my total consciousness, all of the states I've experienced up to now, I can see that there's the phase of being aware of external reality, awake as I am now typing this out.  And then there are various states within that phase - happy states, joyful states, miserable states.  And then, contrasting with awakeness is sleep and its various states.  If I put both phases together, I can see the whole wave of my life, all of my awakenesses and sleeps, and then there is continuity.  I can trace my consciousness back through the day I was born - I mean, I can see that it's all connected, I can feel that.  And even before this body's birth, well, I can see that that's continuous as well.

If life is continuous so far as I can see, a flow in physical space and through time, then this means my individual body motions now are connected with the motions of the bodies of every human back through time, in a very real and literal way.  Eggs and sperm.  Eggs and sperm.  Motions affecting motions.  Internal motions affecting external ones and back and forth.  Some motions have names.  Processes exist, but motions are motions at the fundamental level.  And then there are the larger motions of the earth, and the galaxy, and so on.

All actions, all motions, occur in the present moment.  So, as an individual, if my actions are not aligned with the flow of the moment, then I have some internal energy curving back towards myself and within myself, a swirl, an eddy, a whirlpool.  My muscles stiffen, I'm always on the lookout for the end.  I can get stuck in these swirls and then my internal reality affects and affirms and influences my external reality which reflects a transformed version of itself back to me and the swirl grows faster and deeper.  This is how I understand karma.

For a long time I believed I was worthless and couldn't fathom why my internal music had value in the external world.  I acted out this belief in manifold and myriad ways.

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Fast forward a couple years to this past weekend.  It felt like a confluence of forces acted to totally break apart my mental conception of life and love.

I began focusing on compassion.  Like, what if I looked at myself with total and absolute compassion and love?  What if all of the motions I've tried so hard to control, by virtue of hiding shame and by virtue of fearing life, are actually OK?  What if I looked at all of my motions in the present moment with love?  All of my motions are OK, past, present, and future.  That includes my thoughts.  That includes my physical motions.  And what's more, I can see that there is a link between the two.

There's now a freedom.  I am free to move, free to express, free to connect.  I had a moment in Clark Park this weekend, amongst beloved friends, where I just let myself dissolve into the thing.  The music I was playing was offered up to the general flow of the sounds and motions in the park.  And it just deepened and deepened.

It's the same flow I'd seen years earlier in DC, but now I was connected to it.  If I can look at all of myself with compassion and love, then anything that enters my consciousness, which includes other humans, will be met with compassion and love.  I am now connected to the flow.  All actions are as they should be.

If I can love and accept the shame about myself and my humanity, if I can look at it, I am no longer afraid to look at others.  The consciousness looking back at me, the light in the eyes of those I am connected to, the flow of people in the park, the movement of a fly in my room, it's all the same light, the same movement as I have inside, the same light that's looking at myself with compassion and love.  There's no reason to be afraid.  I am simply part of the flow.

I went to a benefit dinner on Monday, afterglowing from the weekend, and was in a state some would call in Pentecostal Christian circles being "drunk in the spirit" - I've been there before, much younger, after speaking in tongues, so I recognized this for its clarity and joy and communion with others.  It's the joyful flow, the inclusion, the connection, the offering of food, the tears that happen hearing a Native American spiritual being sung, the embarrassment, the feeling uncomfortable being so physically close in a tiny room, and the absolute acceptance of all of that.  And the fall from that state as well.  If I am a filter of the larger thing, a transformer of the larger energy, the overall wave, then acceptance, complete acceptance of the moment is the valve that lets it all flow.  And behind that is peace and love and compassion.

A Dream of a Dark Humanity

Last night I had one of those dreams that felt cleansing, where my subconscious was able to process some of things that have been marinating below the surface for a while.  I woke up feeling positive, feeling love and acceptance.  Most days, I have not opened my eyes in the morning feeling this way.

One of the characters in the dream subscribed to a philosophy of which I cannot remember the name, but had "Greek" in the title.  So I pulled up dream Wikipedia to learn more about this philosophy.  The gist of the article was that humanity has a dark side, that there's no way around this.  It's only through accepting this dark side that there's any chance of finding peace and happiness.  This dream character had accepted their dark side and was now preaching the gospel, so to speak.

Later, I found myself at a bar drawing a colorful blue and white scene on a large piece of paper.  Those around me remarked how dark the image was and upon closer inspection I see there's some horrible stuff going on: torturous, demonic types of things involving pool cues in places they're not usually put.  But this doesn't scare me at all.  In fact, I feel OK with what I've drawn and say this aloud to my dream companions.  And they seem OK with it, too.  It's just an image and, well, we all have a dark side after all.

I've been struggling with this a lot in waking life, recently.  Humanity just feels so dark and horrible.  I mean, we have and we do some really shitty, horrible, unimaginable things to each other - consistently, on a daily basis.  It doesn't help that the news media is tuned into this frequency.  It doesn't help to constantly read about this stuff on Facebook 30 times a day, either.

But, for me, it's more than that.  I've realized recently that I'm particularly sensitive to peoples' energies.  Some would call this being empathic.  What I mean by this is that I can literally feel what someone else is feeling just by seeing them for an instant at a distance, or by passing them on the sidewalk, or even catching a sideways glimpse of their "eye energy field."

I was out to dinner Friday night with a good friend and we were sitting outside.  Streams of people were passing by and I could literally feel the agressiveness of a lot of folks (mostly male) as they walked by.  That's how the world feels to me:  aggressive and uncaring at best, and absolutely horrid and hellish most of the other times.

I mentioned this to my friend later and was surprised and relieved to hear that he felt the same way, that he could feel those things, too, as we were dining.  It's great to be able to relate to people on this level because for so long I've felt alone in it and at times, crazy.

The fact is that as a white male I don't have to deal with a lot of the things that other groups do have to deal with on a daily basis.  I can walk down the street and be pretty sure that no one will harass me.  I'm not going to be discriminated against or killed because of the color of my skin.

But the thing is, I can see and feel that these are realities for a lot of people and it kills me inside.  I can see that there are a lot of atrocious things happening in the world right now and it scares me to death.  Donald Trump is fucking running for president.  The climate is getting more and more fucked up as time progresses.  It doesn't take any special skills sit down and look at the state of things and see that what we have going on is not sustainable.  We're dealing with finite resources and eventually those resources will run out.

And, well, forget the environment for a second.  We as humans treat each other horribly on both the micro and macro levels.  The Dakota Pipeline issue really underscores how power and money are what drive things and how people with that money and power really don't care about other humans.

Brock Turner gets three months in jail for raping a woman who will feel the effects of that "20 minutes of action" for the rest of her fucking life.  It's absolutely insane.

And, yet, there's still part of me that's like, well Brock Fucking Turner is a person, too.  The pipeline building fuckers are also humans.  How does one reconcile that fact, that there are horrible things done to other humans by humans.

It feels like maybe I got some sort of resolution or answer to that question in my dream.  And that is to accept that humans are horrible to each other, it's a baseline fact.  Humanity has a dark side.  I have a dark side by virtue of being human.  To deny my own dark side in some way contributes to the overall denial of humanity's dark side.  And to deny these things only gives them power.

I often wish I didn't have to feel so many things.  I wish I wasn't so damn sensitive.  I'm a fucking sponge sometimes.  I can be feeling perfectly fine one minute, then go outside and walk around the block and now I'm feeling all the anxiety and fear and whatever that is the bedrock of this fucking culture.  And then it becomes hard to differentiate what I'm feeling and what I've picked up from others.

But, as my therapist says, and what I'm slowly coming to recognize, this is also my superpower.  I haven't really become comfortable with it yet, or figured out how to use in a positive way, but it's there.

I guess if there's one thing I'm absolutely sure of, it's that I don't want to hurt anyone.  I can fucking feel the pain of the world just by walking down the street.  I can feel the aggression and the hatred.  And I don't want to contribute any more to the negative pool of humanity that's swirling itself faster and faster around the drain of self-annihilation.

I think about it this way: if the sum total of human suffering is composed of the suffering of each individual who is alive at this moment, then by suffering myself, I am contributing to the overall total.  So the only thing I really can do here is to choose not to suffer myself.  If I contribute less to the suffering footprint of humanity, if I can break my own cycles, then maybe that'll have a small impact on the overall picture.  Maybe if enough people can do this, things might look up.  Maybe that's naive.  What other choice do I have?

It's fucking slow and fucking painful and very imprecise, but I will not be complicit in adding to human suffering, as much as I can manage.  I will own my dark side, because it does exist.  The kingdom of hell is as much inside of me as the kingdom of heaven.