Entry 1: Step into the walk of shame

 It’s been said that the first step is the hardest.  I can attest that the first step into descent is the blindest.  Taking steps by yourself in directions without scoping out the uncharted territory adequately can be extremely dangerous.  Token advice is that if you’re unwilling to take risks, then you’ll never know what you’re capable of.  Not all risks are created equal.  

  People like me, who look and find deeper meaning in almost anything meaning can be derived or created from…it is us who need to be more careful here not to get lost in the details and forget the actual issue we are attempting to unearth the truth of for ourselves.  Upon educating myself on abortion, I found almost nothing of substance.  This could have been an inadequacy in locating clear research according to the limits of my means at the time.  What I did find seemed to be driven by some political or religious ideology which I thought must surely be governed by ancient and outdated ideologies which needed to be challenged.  Either way, I found myself less clear on the facts, but more assured that I needed to take the step which risked less.  From my frame of reference at the time, I decided that removing life from my womb was the less risky move, and so stepped off of a cliff towards my descent into madness.  

  I must note here that the consequences in sharing this journey are somewhat unclear to me, so I am once again taking a risk, though I do hope this step brings me towards the light, into an ascension of sorts.  I have been paralyzed, in some sense, for the better part of five years, enacting a life which is so departed from the parts of me which I respected, cherished, and understood.  It is most difficult to repeatedly look into eyes filled with so much hope of who you’ll become and know that disappointment lurks right behind that hope; for a person so passionately bound to a certain path seems to fall harder once they do fall. Being bound so deeply makes meeting the expectations of others more important, but its pressure more intense.  When in a vulnerable place, pressure often festers more wound within me, but someone’s belief and trust in me grows life.  (A wise man has shown me this.  More on this later.).  My inner person seems to make distinctions between the two.  This is a space I need to consciously infiltrate in order to become aware of when I revert into stagnation and when I rise to meet what inside calls to me from the outside.  Though it seems as though I am being vague, I intend only to preface the factual steps of my journey which certain intangible truths which deep out when considering this content.

It is the marriage of meaning and story which inform these intangible depths within me.  Both need to be heard and understood with my own precision, but please do not mistake these ponderings for your own truth, for that only comes when you are willing to mine the same in yourself by sharing.  Meet all that is within you with a welcome sign to be articulated and understood through the use of a pen.  Allow that within you to flow.  Once you do that with your content, once you understand enough of yourself by holding your ideas up to the light…once you challenge those ideas with facts, norms, policies, ideologies and so on…they become boiled down.  But mistake nothing for THE truth.  That can only be found within your own unique life, in your specific position and through the lens of what you already think you know.  

  My intention is not to confuse you into madness; it is to help you understand, to find principled truth and meaning within yourself so that madness does not end up consuming you as it has me at times in my journey. I write this at the crossroads of madness and hope.  I am taking my turn on hope and I look forward to all who find me there and to all that is found there within me through expressing my self.

  Hope is not a destination or a last stop, but a starting point for anyone who has traversed the depths of anything beyond that which does not bring about meaningful action.  The heaven I find on earth has been informed by facing each moment with the courage to share that which may seem to the dead pen as too honest; but the vulnerability I channel in my journey has counterintuitively been the thing which has sparked the most change and which has created the truest form of strength that courage can anchor onto.  So here I go, into the depths of courage, my untrained mind will be jumping beans until I relearn to focus my attention of what is truly important, so please be patient with my thoughts and ideas at this point.  They will become easier to follow as we go.

  The places I’ve discovered while finding myself lost and far from hope are what I can only describe as chaos or a hell that only a mind forced into solitude as an act of recovering whatever was lost as a result of a bad decision—or perhaps a string of them can find.  When feeling most alone—or possibly most abandoned—as a result of the unmet expectations of a mentor to take some form to show me the path forward, I found myself finding solace in contemplating the world outside of my skin.  I pondered the natural world and eventually nature itself in every form I could understand, even if only in vague terms.  I looked at everything I could possibly imagine nature to be from every vantage point I could channel.  I found it chaotic and imprecise in its choice, void of the meaning we humans tend to filter it through.  Here I became somewhat nihilistic.  I was blatantly aware of many traditional religions answering our questions of ultimate meaning by describing some all-knowing entity, which is described to be in the image of man, keeping score of our good and bad deeds and who, once we die, will sentence us to eternal heaven or hell.  This eternal part is most difficult for me to fathom.  The world is vast in its knowledge of other living creatures and supposedly this god did not consider those creatures to be included in eternity.  I should pause here as I do not want to get into religion.  There are things I believe and things I do not believe in this sense and those can be reserved for a later time.  Let us just say that I could not resolve that this divine force guiding life forward could feel and create meaning as humans do.  Human choices often make little sense rationally, though could probably be somewhat understood and charted if looking at the entire life of a being in order to view choices in a chronological order.  Through the lens of an individual’s stacked experiences and the morphing of belief—or lack thereof—which often follows, I think some sense can be derived from the life of almost any human.  But that there was a being who critically watches the step of each human, filtering it through a book written by humans such as ourselves, this sparked a divorce from myself and my trust in institutions.  Here I made a grave error.  I decided that it was better to understand reality through my own lens than to find it handed to me by institutions.  I wanted meaning which transcended all belief.  It only now seems somewhat greedy to me that I wanted something most cannot find, but I find that attempting to define or understand myself through these moral filters just leads to compounded guilt—and it is specifically this which I can no longer afford.  I trust that by taking meaningful action in sharing my thoughts with you-however unrefined at the point-that my own moral compass will be revealed indirectly and independent of what I may think as a result of the clouded lens of compounded guilt of which I hope to soon absolve myself from in whatever way possible so that I may once again live.

 

  My mind has this mechanism so that at a pause in thought, it wants to spit out and reject what I have already shared as invaluable.  It wants to classify my ability to articulate what I know/what I’ve discovered as falling considerably short of the mark I seek to hit.  Perhaps so far it is right, but not for long…. For now I will just continue on as what is yielded from not writing is far more terrifying than what seems to be yielded when I do write.  Where was I?

 Ah.  I stated that at a point in my deconstruction of reality, I divorced myself from trusting in institutions.  I would like to clarify that this is possibly a mistake for most and I only divorced myself from ‘blindly’ trusting in institutions.  I did this as a means of understanding reality from the ground up, from the inside out.  I must convey that this can be a dangerous thing to do without being grounded in some way that I most certainly was not at this point, but I followed “my truth” with reckless abandon; I hope not selfishly.  I found that dissolving all that I had been programmed to believe in any way at all actually equates to dissolving belief in every way possible for someone like me.  This was easier to achieve in theory, as all of my thoughts flow from an already programmed state which can only be deprogrammed by a new means of filtering reality which in a sense is just another program and so on.  I’ve found another rabbit hole, so I’m going to move on again.

 Tradition and institution seem to me to be married in some sense, possibly politically and/or religiously.  My own particular programming, which I assumed was informed by its own brand of tradition, was one that I could not/would not deeply trust.  I observed so much pain and death in my formative years.  These were profusely mourned or to the same degree avoided by those I was meant to trust.  My questions were met with physical violence of which I am certain was meant to silence those questions.  Who I inherently am instead found an inner fire for those questions and a resilience I don’t entirely understand.  I have no memories of ever trying to quiet this internal voice as a youth.  Instead, I began writing.  No one guided me in this direction that I can remember.  It was something unconsciously born within me.  It was the only refuge I found while shielding my heart from becoming as calloused as the body I arrived in became calloused to physical pain.  It’s unclear how often my body was met with the entire force of another’s fists, hands, metal belt buckles, corners of refrigerators and various other hard objects, but I know it wouldn’t be excessive for me to say very often.  The frequency is not remembered as clearly as the beginning (at 11yo) or the ending (at 17yo).  That was the year the it stopped.  I remember that year with clarity.  I left home on the day I turned 17.  I remember pouring myself into my schoolwork and enjoying it with a passion.  From that day forward, learning became a driving force for many of my actions.  I’m not sure if I knew it then, but maybe I understood that in order to learn or to continue growing in a certain direction, that something else has to die.  I think at that time I was ready for a lot of what I had learned to die to anything which didn’t force me into silence.  It was that part which never bothered me until a few years ago.  I realized that what was dying were some crucial parts of myself which I needed to maintain a healthy functioning person in society.  I guess it is important to preserve some aspects of ourselves.  I will leave that up to you to decide for yourself.  For my journey, this was true.

  In order for tradition—something which I thought to have failed me—to die, I suppose I rather unconsciously opened myself to search for undying truth in the words of other people—or rather, my own conclusions drawn from the words of other people.  The people I listened for were those who seemed to be on a steady course of creating peace and meaning for others.  I listened to those people because I wanted to walk that path.  I also derived deep meaning from the words of others found in book on philosophy and psychology and anything in between.  I found that by cross-pollinating what I had found to be good and true for my life, I could create my own traditions and therefore my own peace.  I spent many years of my life there, in a place of peace.  These years were mostly in my twenties.  Though not perfectly peaceful, much more of what I needed was found, created and re-birthed  in various ways.

  I can say with almost complete certainty that it was an abortion at five weeks pregnant I had, which hurled me into the chaos of reality of which I was unprepared to face and conquer.  This chaos, which I now observe, manifested as a result of guilt that I unknowingly left unchecked.  Without religion or institutions or a strict resolve in any particular philosophy or belief, I had no point at which to analyze what might be going on within me at the time.  It was not obvious to me that guilt was what caused the unending, gnawing pain.  Make sure that the choices you make are ones you can live with or you may spend your life trying to face your conscience and the guilt which at this point I still have yet to conquer.  As for the foreseeable future, I still have no clear path of resolve.  My life, as imperfect as it was, was enjoyable and meaningful.  I loved it with only the torture I knew as torture thrust upon me by others.  This is oftentimes incredibly painful and sometimes unlivable, but the torture I have felt from the conviction of personal guilt—it has been much worse.  The consequences much more unyielding in their internal links to certain feelings, such as guilt, much more gnawing…like a plague.  We need to slow down in our conversations as a society regarding abortion.  Progress is sometimes gained from slowing down.  We can lose many important truths in our pursuit of progress if not rigorous in our thinking.  What we believe to be “right” can more often than not afford to be held up to scrutiny.  

I think because the conviction stems from guilt.  I believe guilt to be one of the darkest places we can journey in a lifetime.