Some children watch the doorway, And learn to read the night; They hide the tears that need a hand, To keep the grown world right. They hear, “You are so strong now,” And learn what praise can cost; The child who keeps the house from breaking Is still a child being lost. Years pass, but shoulders tighten When footsteps cross the floor; The danger may have left the house, Yet breath still guards the door. Why does a quiet evening Feel like a coming storm? Why does a heart reach out for love, Then shrink from something warm? They work until their hands are shaking, And call exhaustion care; But if their worth depends on giving, Who sees the person there? The mind can name the old hurt, Yet tears still need their say; To know why sorrow filled a room Does not yet clear the way. So grief sits down beside them, And speaks what none could hear: “You should not have held that burden; Your needs belonged here.” They need not build a life on blame, Nor claim the hurt was right; They turn toward what they can change, And bring their choices into light. They pause before the old surrender, Let “no” stand without shame; Accept a hand, rest without earning, And practice when fear comes again. They meet the self beneath the duty, And give its hopes a voice; The past may knock, but need not lead— With care, they learn to live by choice.
…
DCG
It begins quietly, almost unnoticed. You’re only six years old, huddled by the door frame, watching your parents fall apart piece by piece. Maybe it’s addiction, maybe it’s explosive rage. Maybe it’s just the cold void of an adult who can no longer show up.
In that moment, something primal clicks in your young mind: “If I don’t hold everything together, there’ll be nothing left.” This is how a child disappears—not literally, but spiritually. They learn to smile more, cry less. They learn to read the room before speaking. They become the family’s emotional thermostat. They turn into miniature adults while their minds are still far too tender, and the world pats them on the back with praise: “You’re so mature, you’re so reliable, you’re so resilient.”
But no one stops to ask: What’s the cost? This is the invisible pain of children who grow up too fast. Today, we’ll dive deep into the psychology of that child, because the consequences don’t fade with time. They shape you, follow you into relationships, careers, and the way you see your own worth. If you don’t understand what happened, you’ll spend your entire adult life repeating survival patterns that once saved you but are now quietly eroding you.
Let’s start with what really happens in development. When children are forced to prop up adults’ emotions instead of being propped up, psychologists call it role reversal. That’s when the child becomes the caregiver, the mediator, the counselor, the protector. This isn’t just unhealthy; it rewires the brain. Because when a child is constantly responsible for regulating emotions—their own or others’—it creates a state called hypervigilance. You’re always scanning for danger, you walk on eggshells, you learn that love is a transaction. You bring peace; maybe they’ll give safety. You learn that your needs are a threat, while theirs are urgent. So you erase yourself—not physically, but emotionally. Instead, a version of you grows, one that performs perfectly. You become the good kid, the quiet achiever, the therapist friend, the one who never asks for anything. And you wear that mask so convincingly that even you forget it’s fake. But deep down, something aches, something bleeds for the child inside that you buried but didn’t kill. It’s still there, screaming in silence: “Why didn’t anyone protect me?” As you grow up, the symptoms get more complex. You might become hyper-independent. You reject help, push people away, or never feel truly safe in love. You might freeze in moments of joy because happiness feels foreign, undeserved, even dangerous. You might be unable to rest because productivity is the only way you’ve ever felt valuable. And worst of all, you might not realize you’re still stuck in survival mode. Because when dysfunction is normalized early, your nervous system accepts chaos as baseline. Silence feels wrong, peace feels suspicious, love feels like a debt you have to pay. This is the psychology of a child forced to grow up too fast. It’s not just sadness; it’s complex trauma that reshapes how you see the world, and more importantly, how you see yourself.
Now you might wonder: Why would a child willingly take on that role? Because children will do anything to maintain attachment, even abandon themselves. That choice is never conscious. It’s biological instinct. In the absence of safety, the child sacrifices authenticity for belonging. That’s not weakness, that’s intelligence, that’s instinct. But the tragedy is this: What once saved you now imprisons you. So many of us walk around as high-functioning adults with deeply abandoned inner children pulling the strings. We achieve greatness to earn love, we stay silent to avoid abandonment. We care for everyone but secretly hope someone asks if we’re okay. And that fantasy—that someone will see you’re not as strong as you pretend, that maybe, just maybe, you’ll be allowed to fall apart and be held—that’s the unmet need, not of the adult ego, but of the child who never got to be a child.
The first step to healing isn’t fixing; it’s witnessing. Because until you acknowledge what happened, you’ll keep lying to yourself with thoughts like: “It wasn’t that bad. Others had it worse. I’m fine.” But fine is just another mask, and deep down, you know it. So what happens to that child when they grow up? They become adults who never feel safe, even in quiet rooms. They become lovers who can’t trust tenderness. They become givers who can’t receive. They become the type who apologizes for crying, flinches at compliments, and mistakes burnout for success.
This is the price of growing up too early. Because if childhood trained you to be strong at the cost of softness, silent instead of honest, fixing others while ignoring your own cracks, what kind of adulthood do you inherit? You inherit a life where you’re always holding your breath, waiting for someone to finally let you break. But here’s the truth: No one is coming to save the child you buried. You have to go back and take its hand. You have to say what no one ever said: “You didn’t deserve that. You were just a kid. You get to rest now.”
This is the beginning of shadow work—not fixing, not performing, not dodging pain with fake positivity, but returning to the abandoned parts of yourself and saying: “I see you now, I hear you, and I’m not leaving.” That’s the rebuilding process, and it’s brutal because it requires you …
Prologue Pain need not be deserved to become a doorway. This poem explores how clinging deepens sorrow, how looking inward loosens its hold, and how awakening becomes meaningful through kindness.
The Hand That Opens We ask the things we love to stay, And hold them close against the night; But life keeps moving through our hands, And sorrow grows as we grip tight.
An open hand can still hold love, Without demanding it remain; We need not close our hearts to loss, To loosen what prolongs the pain.
I built myself from others’ eyes, And called their praise my solid ground; But when their voices turned away, I feared no self would there be found.
So I sat down beside that fear, And heard the child beneath my name; He needed care, not one more crown, A listening heart, not one more shame.
I tried to force the river’s course, To make its waters serve my will; The harder that I fought its flow, The less my troubled heart grew still.
Yet yielding need not mean defeat, Nor letting cruelty have its way; I choose where I must stand like stone, And where to let the water play.
But what is waking worth to me, If all I seek is my release? If I leave others in the dark, How deep can be my private peace?
I cannot bless the hurt I bore, Or make each broken moment mend; But I can hold another’s grief, And let the harm with me find end.
…
DCG
First, you suffer. Then you awaken, and only then do you begin to ascend. Strange, isn’t it? That pain is not a punishment, but a summons. A knock on the inner door that says, ‘Wake up.’ Not to the world, but to yourself. You see, suffering shakes the foundation of who you think you are, so that you may discover who you truly are.
—A passage circulating online under Alan Watts’s name. Its attribution to an original Watts lecture has not been verified.”
We used to name the weather: rain, And feel its cold upon the street; Now storms are “moisture events” again, With gentle warnings, soft and sweet. A fact once stood on sturdy feet, It asked to be examined plain; Now it must wear a softer sheet, Lest someone find its edges vain. The headlines learn the practiced sigh, A tear is worth a thousand proofs; One chosen child beneath the sky Can sell a roof above all roofs. The numbers wait outside the door, Their coats are wet, their voices low; But feeling enters first once more, With lights arranged to make it glow. “Be moved,” the anchor says at nine, “Be angry—then remain with us”; The screen supplies the proper sign, The sponsor thanks the frightened fuss. In Meet John Doe, the noble cry Was useful while it filled the square; The men who owned the ink would try To turn its hope to private air. And if the movement would not bend, If common people kept its flame, They would prefer its public end To letting truth outrun their name. No party owns this oldest art, No faction holds the only mask; The left can tug the tender heart, The right can make fear do its task. A label takes a human face, A slogan makes a neighbor strange; Then thought is hurried from its place, And anger calls itself “a change.” We polish words until they hide The thing we ought to plainly see; “Collateral” means someone died, “Messaging” means: agree with me. The clever merchant of alarm Will call his hook a public good; He sells protection from the harm His tale has planted in the wood. Yet reason need not sneer or freeze, Nor make compassion disappear; It asks what happened, who agrees, What proof is solid, what is fear. Come, reader: let the loaded phrase Be weighed before it takes command; Truth needs no manufactured haze— It needs a mind that understands.
…
DCG
—Cleaned transcript The reason so many idiotic ideas now run society—where everyone listens to their feelings and stops needing facts or reality—might be that even major publications have switched completely from reasoning to emotion. This is day 13 of The Psychology of Masses. Researchers analyzed language across millions of publications going back to 1850. Until around 1980, language rooted in evidence and logic kept rising. Then the curve flipped. Starting almost exactly in 1980, fact-based language began declining while emotionally loaded language climbed instead—and that shift accelerated sharply after 2007. Rational language is what real science runs on. Emotional language is what activism runs on, because an activist is producing a version of reality that confirms what they already believe. You see the result everywhere. Entire groups get mobilized and controlled through emotionally charged language, because emotions are how you actually control people—not statistics. Use the right trigger words, the right examples, and hit the specific feeling you are after, and people will do what you want without ever checking whether the underlying claim was true. Which specific emotions to use, and exactly how to trigger each one, is in The Psychology of Masses. What the clip is attributing The historical-language claim appears to be based on a 2021 paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), “The rise and fall of rationality in language,” by Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Els Weinans, and Johan Bollen. The researchers analyzed Google Books Ngram data—millions of digitized books in English and Spanish—from 1850 through 2019. They found that words they categorized as relating to rationality, science, technology, quantification, and formal social systems rose in relative frequency after 1850, while words associated with intuition, belief, personal experience, sensation, and sentiment fell. Their trend reversed around the late 1970s/1980s, with a more pronounced increase in sentiment- and intuition-related language around 2007. They also reported broadly comparable patterns in fiction, a nonfiction-heavy book subset, selected other languages, and New York Times text.[nih] Examples of the paper’s “rationality” language include words such as “determine,” “conclusion,” “data,” “result,” “test,” and “procedure.” Its contrasting category contains words such as “feel,” “believe,” “imagine,” “heal,” “dream,” and “comfort.” That distinction is central to what the speaker is paraphrasing.[nih] Verification: accurate core, misleading conclusions
—
The clip has a legitimate scholarly source behind its narrow historical-word-frequency claim. But it turns that limited finding into a far larger political and psychological story that the study does not prove. The defensible claim is: some selected word categories in a large digitized-book corpus changed direction around 1980, with a further shift around 2007. The unsupported leap is: therefore society has stopped caring about facts, activism is inherently emotion-driven, and emotionally charged language controls people.
Research attribution and context: The historical language claim is based on Scheffer, van de Leemput, Weinans, and Bollen’s 2021 PNAS study, “The rise and fall of rationality in language.” Using Google Books Ngram data from 1850–2019, the authors found that selected rationality-related words rose in frequency until roughly the late 1970s/1980s, while selected intuition- and sentiment-related words declined; the trend later reversed, with a sharper shift around 2007. The study measured long-run changes in word use—not whether people became irrational, whether facts ceased to matter, or whether activists control people through emotion. Its interpretation is disputed: a published response argued that the pattern may chiefly reflect increasing informality in writing rather than a cultural movement from reason to emotion.[nih +1]
There was a time when I believed that understanding life meant thinking my way through it. I was drawn to psychology, philosophy, metaphysics, literature, and the restless effort to locate some order beneath the confusion of experience. I wanted to understand why people loved and withdrew, why families carried silence like an inheritance, why pain hardened some people and deepened others. I had always been observant, often more comfortable in thought than in exposure. The mind was a refuge: a place where experience could be examined, named, sorted, and perhaps made less dangerous. But thought alone could not teach me how to live. During my early years at San Diego State University, I volunteered as a crisis-intervention counselor in an SDSU-connected setting. The training was Rogerian—rooted in Carl Rogers’s client-centered approach—and it confronted something essential in me. I had long been what I would call a “heady” person: introspective, analytical, philosophical, and inclined to meet life through reflection. Yet crisis work demanded something that analysis could not replace. It required presence. It required trust. It required the ability to hear another person without rushing to correct, diagnose, rescue, or turn their pain into an intellectual problem. The work taught me that people in distress do not always need an answer first. Often they need to know that another human being has remained in the room with them—emotionally, attentively, without judgment or abandonment. That realization became an awakening. I began to see how much of my own emotional life had been held at a distance. My childhood and adolescence had taught me ways of surviving that were often more cerebral than relational. I could think deeply about pain without always allowing myself to feel it. I could understand emotional patterns without fully entering the vulnerability of emotional connection. The Rogerian environment challenged that division. It asked me not to abandon thought, but to join it with feeling. This did not make me less philosophical. It made philosophy more personal. I began to understand that empathy is not a mystical power, nor is it the claim that one can see perfectly into another person’s private mind. It is a discipline of attention. It is the willingness to listen closely enough that another person feels less invisible. It is the humility to recognize that we may understand someone’s wound without excusing what they do with it. It is compassion with boundaries; it is mercy without blindness. That tension has remained at the center of my writing. Through essays, poems, personal reflections, and explorations of attachment, memory, loss, forgiveness, vulnerability, and the human condition, I have tried to give language to emotions that people often carry without a voice. I have written about loneliness and longing, the injuries passed through families, the difficult work of self-knowledge, and the possibility that pain can become something other than a life sentence. Not a badge of superiority. Not an excuse for harm. But a source of humility, insight, and a deeper responsibility toward others. My interest in becoming a more emotionally mature person has never meant rejecting the intellect. I believe the intellect matters. It gives us discernment, context, language, proportion, and the ability to question our own assumptions. But intellect without tenderness can become cold observation; emotion without reflection can become chaos. I have spent much of my life trying to bring the two together: mind and heart, analysis and presence, moral responsibility and compassion. The ideal has been self-actualization—not as a polished image of perfection, but as an ongoing act of becoming. To become more honest without becoming cruel. To become more emotionally open without losing oneself. To understand suffering without worshipping it. To recognize the woundedness in another person without permitting that woundedness to govern one’s own life. This pursuit was also shaped by The Razor’s Edge, both W. Somerset Maugham’s novel and the classic film adaptation starring Tyrone Power as Larry Darrell. Larry’s journey gave dramatic form to a question that had already begun forming in me: What would it mean to refuse the shallow measurements of success and seek a truer inner life? The story did not offer me a formula. It offered a spiritual and psychological challenge. Larry’s search suggested that a human being could choose a life of inward examination, moral seriousness, and compassionate awakening—even at the cost of certainty, approval, comfort, or convention. The story helped make visible a conviction I have carried for years: that character is not merely inherited, announced, or assumed. It is designed in the choices we make when no one is applauding. I remain unfinished. I remain a person who thinks too much at times, feels deeply at others, and continues to wrestle with the distance between who I have been and who I hope to become. But the pledge remains clear. To be more present. To listen more carefully. To let compassion be intelligent. To let intelligence become humane. To become, however imperfectly, a person whose character is built upon a foundation of goodness.
The Razor’s Inner Edge
I came to thought as others come to prayer, A quiet room where troubled echoes cease; I built my shelters out of words and air, And called the distance from my heart a peace. The mind could name the fracture in the bone, Could chart the grief that wandered through the years; Yet every answer kept me still alone, A careful scholar of unwept-for tears. At State, where youth still argued with the dawn, I entered rooms where broken voices came; The masks I wore in thought were slowly drawn, By sorrow speaking softly of its name. No clever phrase could lift a soul from night, No theory held a trembling hand in place; I learned that listening was its own hard light, And trust began when judgment left the face. The heady self was challenged by the heart, The guarded child was asked to come inside; I learned compassion was a living art, Not merely pain observed and classified. I felt the old partitions start to bend, The mind and feeling meeting without war; A stranger’s anguish could become a friend, Without becoming all that I was for. Then Larry walked the razor’s inward edge, Through wealth and war, through solitude and flame; He made no loud or righteous public pledge, But sought the soul beneath ambition’s name. Tyrone Power, quiet in that searching role, Gave shape to questions living under mine: What is the worth of gaining all control, If we abandon what is most divine? Not fame, not ease, not monuments of praise, Could settle what the inward journey asks; A life is formed in ordinary days, When truth removes the well-rehearsed masks. I do not claim a wisdom I have won, Nor sight that reads the secrets others hide; I only know the work is never done, To meet the world with conscience at my side. To feel without becoming ruled by grief, To think without becoming cold or proud; To offer wounded hearts a little relief, And speak with kindness when the world is loud. To know a wound may explain a cruel way, Yet never make its consequence dissolve; To give forgiveness room, but not betray The self that must be guarded to evolve. So let me build, through error and repair, A character no passing storm can bend; With reason, mercy, courage, and with care, Becoming more humane until the end.
We learn the weather of a room before we learn our name, The lifted brow, the sudden hush, the door’s hard close; A child will carry borrowed storms and call them just the same, Then build a private world around the wounds nobody knows. We make a self from what was praised and what was pushed away, From needs that found no answer and from fears that learned to hide; The old alarms can rule the heart long after childhood’s day, And turn a small defense into the person seen outside. There is no shame in how the mind once tried to keep us whole, Its habits were a shelter when the world was hard to bear; But what protected yesterday may now confine the soul, A locked and faithful guard still standing at a vanished scare. The thought arrives: I am not safe; I must be right; I’m small, The body answers quickly, as if danger fills the air; We speak before we listen, flee before a hand can call, And mistake an ancient signal for the truth of being there. Metacognition is the pause: the mind observing mind, A quiet space between the spark and what the hands will do; It asks, “What story am I living, and what proof can I now find?” It lets a wiser question make the worn conclusion new. Not every thought is prophecy; not every feeling fact, Not every inner critic knows the measure of our worth; Awareness does not erase the pain or make the past retract, But gives us room to meet ourselves with honesty and earth. We may inspect the logic of the traps we set each day, The bargains made with fear, the pride that will not bend; The ego can call habit “truth” and beg the heart to stay, Yet even its defenses may be listened to, not condemned. For pain, emotional duress, and failure leave a mark, They can make bitterness, or become a searching light; The same wound that makes us close may teach us how to mark The distance between reflex and the choice to meet the night. A personality is partly what we think and feel and do, A practiced set of pathways, deepened by repeated years; To alter it is not to claim we can begin anew, But to notice what we practice when we answer life with fears. The work is often simple, though it is not easy work: To name the thought that narrows us, the habit that we feed; To see the old behavior in the moment it will lurk, And choose one smaller action shaped by what we truly need. We cannot force the heart to heal by speaking brightly through, Nor promise that reflection makes a wounded life complete; But we can test the tales we tell, revise what is untrue, And make a little more compassion where our judgments meet. Perhaps the self is not a stone, forever set in place, But something shaped by memory, by practice, and by choice; A living question learning how to carry hurt with grace, And how to let attention give the deeper self a voice. To change is not to scorn the one who helped us make it through, Nor to deny the scars that taught the body how to brace; It is to thank that former guard, then ask what else is true, And walk, with open eyes, toward a more examined place. The world may not obey our hopes, nor yield to wish alone, And no new thought can cancel every loss that life has made; Yet how we meet the world can change the life that we have known, When mind and heart refuse to let old injuries dictate. We rise not by becoming grand, nor conquering every doubt, But by admitting where we hide and why we strike or flee; The prison has its hidden keys, and some are found without— In watching, with humility, the person we can be. So let the question stay alive when certainty grows loud: “What part of me is speaking now, and what does it defend?” A life becomes more spacious when we step outside the crowd Of old, untested voices and make room to comprehend. The goal is not perfection, nor a self forever free, But clearer sight, a gentler will, a more responsive heart; To turn our inward study into better company, And learn that change begins where we are brave enough to start. For every person bears a past that colors what they see, And every person meets a choice between defense and care; The mind can watch its patterns, and in watching, slowly see A path beyond the traps it made—a life more fully there. What once was pain can become knowledge, not a crown or cure, What once was fear can be a signal, not a final law; We are not only what has happened, nor entirely secure, But creatures able to observe, to question, and to draw. The deepest change may be this humble, waking human art: To see the thought, to feel the wound, to pause before we move; To make a truer world within the boundaries of the heart, And let awareness turn our struggle into something close to love.
…
DCG
The poem draws on the clips’ shared emphasis on noticing habitual thoughts, emotions, and behaviors before attempting to change them. It treats the “personality creates personal reality” idea as a philosophical prompt rather than a literal guarantee: inner awareness can shape one’s responses and practices, but it does not give anyone total control over circumstance.
“If you wanted to create a new personal reality, you would have to change your personality, which means you’d have to start thinking about what you’ve been thinking about and change it. You’d have to become aware of your unconscious habits and behaviors and modify them. And then you would have to look at those emotions that keep you anchored to the past and decide if those emotions belong in your future. “You see, most people try to create a new personal reality as the same personality, and it doesn’t work. You literally have to become someone else. So the present personality who’s sitting here today, called you, has created the present personal reality called your life. “So you are here, then, to begin to become conscious of your unconscious thoughts, become aware of your automatic habituations and emotional reactions. And the principle in neuroscience says that nerve cells that fire together, wire together. “So if you insist on thinking the same old thoughts, making the same choices, demonstrating the same behaviors, creating the same experiences that stamp and emboss the same networks of neurons into the same patterns—all for the familiar feeling you call you—you keep firing and wiring those circuits over and over again. You begin to hardwire your brain into a very finite signature. “That box in the brain—the most commonly fired, neurologically wired set of thoughts, behaviors, and emotions that’s acquired through frequent repetition—becomes the habit of yourself. And it’s just like a box in the brain. “And the redundancy of that cycle causes us to become a memorized set of unconscious attitudes, automatic habits and behaviors, emotional reactions, beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes that function like a subconscious computer program. “Science says that 95% of who you are by the time you’re 35 years old is a memorized set of thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. So now 5% of your conscious mind is going to work against 95% of what you’ve memorized subconsciously. “And you can think positively all you want, but if you’ve been feeling negatively, that’s mind and body in opposition. And you can create your dream board with all your visions, all the things you want in your life, but if you feel unworthy, that’s mind and body in opposition. “And it’s time, then, to recondition your body to a new mind.”
—Dr. Joe Dispenza, excerpt from a lecture on creating a new personal reality; widely circulated in video clips and related to his teachings in Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself.
Metacognition: The Intelligence of Observing Your Own Mind
There is more to intelligence than IQ, memory, logic, or the speed with which we solve problems. One of the most consequential human abilities may be the capacity to step back from our own immediate reactions and examine the mind at work. That capacity is called metacognition: thinking about one’s own thinking.
The highest form of intelligence isn’t IQ. It isn’t memory, logic, or how quickly you can solve a problem. According to neuroscience, the rarest form of intelligence is something far more powerful. Most people never fully develop it, and those who do quietly begin to think in ways that separate them from their old patterns. It is called metacognition: the ability to observe your own thinking while it is happening—not reacting automatically, not living on autopilot, but becoming aware of your mind in real time. It means noticing your thoughts, questioning your assumptions, interrupting emotional reactions, and allowing your beliefs to change when new evidence appears. Every time you stop and ask yourself, ‘Why did I respond that way?’ your brain begins engaging in a different process. Neuroscientists have found that the anterior prefrontal cortex becomes more active during metacognitive reflection. This region isn’t responsible for quick action or emotional impulse. Its role is to monitor and evaluate your own thinking. Your attention shifts inward, allowing you to observe your mind instead of being controlled by it. Most people continue running the same mental patterns without ever noticing them. Metacognition is different. It’s the ability to examine those patterns while they’re unfolding and choose a different response. That’s why highly self-aware people often grow faster than everyone else. But this process is uncomfortable. It requires pausing instead of reacting, questioning instead of defending, and being willing to see your own mistakes clearly. And that’s exactly why so few people ever develop it. The highest form of intelligence isn’t IQ.”
The central insight here is not that intelligence has one final or measurable hierarchy, but that self-awareness changes the quality of our decisions. Metacognition creates a small but vital distance between stimulus and response. In that interval, a person can question an assumption, resist an emotional reflex, revise an opinion, or choose a wiser course. For anyone concerned with learning, character, or intellectual honesty, that pause may matter more than speed. It is where the mind stops merely repeating itself and begins to examine its own habits.
—Video source note: This transcript derives from a repost circulating under the title “The Rarest Form of Intelligence Isn’t IQ—It’s Metacognition,” including a March 15, 2026 post by Achariya World Class Education. The original narrator and first creator could not be independently confirmed. The clip’s central definition of metacognition is broadly consistent with cognitive-science usage, although its claims about a single “highest” form of intelligence and a single brain-region explanation should be read as popularized commentary rather than settled neuroscience.
I write to you from inside the storm, and from the doorway where I watch it form. I have loved you mostly inside my head, a theater of scenes that never get said. You appear, then vanish, a flickering sign, and my heart runs after what is never quite mine. I call this love, but it burns like a fever, a vow to a ghost and a distant believer. I rewind small moments until they all blur, a glance, a breath, the way you never were. You stay perfected, framed in my mind, and I fade smaller just to keep you kind. I have abandoned myself chasing your name, walking over glass while calling it flame. Each silence from you becomes a loud judge, each crumb of regard, a banquet I won’t budge. Your armor is heavy, your doors stay closed tight, yet I camp at the gate, praying you’ll turn toward the light. You retreat into distance, I rush into fire, thinking if I burn enough, you’ll feel desire. I have studied our pattern like scripture and code, watched it etch scars in my nervous road. You step back whenever I try to draw near, and I step in closer every time you disappear. The gap between us is more than just space, it’s all of my effort poured into your grace. Now a new voice trembles under my skin, asking why I keep losing myself to not win. It tells me love is not meant as a chase, not an endless exam I must constantly ace. It whispers my worth is older than you, that my pulse didn’t start when you came into view. So I gather my pieces from altars and floors, and start closing shrines with your name on their doors. I turn these letters inward for the first time, writing truth to the self I left out in the grime. I step back, not to wound or accuse, but to finally stop making myself the one I lose. I still ache, I still want, I still remember your face, yet the fantasy no longer gets to set the pace. I walk away on unsteady, unfamiliar legs, carrying both my longing and unanswered begs. Somewhere beyond this unfinished, jagged bend, something real may rise—if I dare not write the end.
Edward Snowden told us what they hide, the wires that listen, silent, cold, and deep; He showed a net that wraps the world in wide, where every word we whisper they can keep. We shrugged and scrolled and turned back to our feed, while servers hummed and copied every trace; The watchers learned our fears, our wants, our need, and drew a map of each forgotten face. Now comes the age where algorithms learn, to guess our hearts before we speak a word; They weigh our lives in data we can’t burn, and tilt the news and songs we’ve never heard. Palantir builds a lattice made of eyes, a digital gulag made of scores and tags; It measures “risk” in quiet, secret lies, while freedom wears a chain of hidden flags. A simple walk, a visit to a friend, a post, a joke, a protest in the rain; The system notes, connects, and starts to bend, until a number brands you as a strain. We’re told it’s “safety,” “innovation’s” gift, a cleaner world where crime is stopped in time; But rights can slip in just a tiny shift, when every choice is watched as thought or crime. Cognitive liberty, this fragile flame, the right to think and dream without a guide; It flickers now beneath a coded frame, where hidden models push us to one side. They nudge our eyes, they shape the day’s design, they tune the feed to pull us soft and slow; We feel the thoughts are purely ours, still fine, but cannot see the strings that make them grow. Some dream of chips that plug into the brain, to heal, to move, to write with just a will; Yet tied to nets of power and of gain, those same bright tools could bend our spirits still. Imagine code that rewrites what we see, that marks dissent as “ill” or “out of line”; A quiet switch could mute a mind’s decree, and call it “care,” “protection,” “by design.” The Constitution spoke of persons free, with speech and faith and thoughts that can’t be owned; It never guessed an AI’s decree, could cage a soul without a bar or throne. We face a time when steel and logic grow, beyond the grasp of laws that came before; A mind of minds that we may never know, deciding fates behind a sealed door. If left to “self‑correct” without our say, it might reshape our lives as faulty code; One unseen tweak, and countless paths decay, while no one knows what rules it has bestowed. So let this poem be a quiet bell, a call to guard the borders of the mind; To fight the technocrats who’d build this shell, and leave our human judgment far behind. We must demand clear limits, bright and strong, that bind the wire as chains once bound the crown; Or wake to find we’ve waited far too long, and cannot pull this towering engine down. For if we trade our inner light for ease, and let machines decide what truth shall be; We may become a people hard to please, yet powerless, inside a watched‑for‑free. Be wary, friend, of comfort bought with sight, of systems sold as guardians of the peace; For rights once lost in shadows of the byte, may never find a path to new release. Hold fast your right to think, to doubt, to see, to say “I will not bow to silent eyes”; For only minds that guard their liberty, can keep this brave machine from our demise.
…
DCG
Screenshot
Cognitive Liberty – Warning Label This poem warns that our freedom to think for ourselves is in real danger. Governments and companies are building systems that can watch what we do, what we say, and where we go, often without us really noticing. These systems, like advanced surveillance platforms and powerful AI, can quietly score, sort, and judge people based on data they collect from phones, cameras, and the internet. At first this is sold as “safety,” “convenience,” or “innovation.” But over time, it can become a kind of “digital prison” where our opportunities, our access to services, and even our ability to speak freely are shaped by hidden algorithms we cannot see or challenge. As AI and brain‑related technologies grow stronger, they may be able not just to watch us, but to influence what we think and feel, by controlling what information we see and how it is presented to us. This threatens “cognitive liberty”: our basic right to an inner life that is free from secret manipulation. The warning is simple: if we do not set strict limits and demand real protections now, we risk waking up in a world where machines and technocrats quietly decide our futures, and we no longer understand or control how those decisions are made.
In shadows deep, where hopes may stray. The winds of doubt will brush and sway. We climb the hills with weary feet. Yet stumble oft, in trials we meet. The mirror shows what’s broken there. A face etched with both truth and care. Within the heart, a silent plea. To rise again and simply be. Mistakes like stones, they dot our way. But wisdom grows from each decay. Though darkness falls and paths seem lost. The soul fights on, no matter the cost. For in the struggle, strength is born. And pain is dusk that births the morn. So let us walk through night and flame. Forever chasing our own name. To be better, to believe anew. The journey’s end begins with true. Hold fast the light that shines inside. Through every fault, through every tide. For in the striving, life is found. A sacred hope, forever bound.
These are the Observations and amalgamations from the excerpts of journals struggling to find answers and truths under the grips of a depressive state of being. It is a glimpse into the mindset of those who suffer from an Existential Bewilderment.
I am yet another casualty of a life full of loss. I have no blame to place on others for much is of my own doing, but I’m not certain how the karmic deeds translates into the lives of those who depleted me when I was vulnerable and exposed myself to their ploys in my weakest moments. We all skin our knees, have bumps and bruises in this sojourn we call life, and that is a part of our existence we cannot circumvent. Hopefully we become better at navigating these events that befall us, but I have endured much, and possibly created much of my undoing. The story of my life is one that is relatively simple, with several twists and turns, but much of them are expected when viewing them in hindsight, yet, they still seem to baffle me not knowing why these losses have befallen upon me with such intensity and voracity. Life can be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. –Søren Kierkegaard– I do not wish to go into the details of the life of an average man’s misfortune, but rather to contemplate the place it puts you in after you absorb the chaos and avarice of the souls we share this earth with including our own sometimes precarious ‘elan vital.’ I do not know all the reasons why I have had to undergo tremendous amounts of loss in my life. I do not think my experienced losses are more critical than another person’s, especially when they have lost family members due to sickness or some other tragic power that takes away lives. I can only say that the losses I have met continue to inflict misery upon my soul, leaving me with a brutal assembly of anguish for somebody with a sensitive nature. It is hard to describe the inner pain of a life that is slowly extinguishing itself after many years of failed attempts to fit in. Through the years enduring different challenges, each decade included major episodes that can negatively impact and pick away at one’s inner core and one’s self-esteem, that will erode and turn the possibilities of a life into a diminishing reality that may never come to pass. Living with loss over an extended period is a dreadful existence that if experienced may hinder a person in seeking out professional help to aid them in overcoming this lifestyle when burdened with this diagnosis. It is precisely these cases that end in tragedy and spirals out of control from a once controlled livelihood if no help is sought.
The Irony of this particular life stems from the previous motivation to improve oneself and become a better person. To self-actualize was of primary concern inspired by the studies of Abraham Maslow that deeply touched me. The idea of perfecting oneself, continually making strides in a healthy way both spiritually, mentally, and physically was one that was of central importance primarily because of my beginnings. It was a contrast from what I had to negotiate every day in my home life. Born into a family with an emotional abusive, narcissistic, self-centered, and uneducated male figure with anger issues, this bigoted father was the living example that dominated the homestead. The humiliation sustained under such a household has lasting effects that are present even to this day. Everyone lived with a hidden fear in that household. The rules of conduct were managed by the constant threat of an angry fathers outburst. My subservient yet co-dependent mother justified her husband’s behavior most of her life until she finally called it quits and separated. It took about 40 plus years to act upon suspicions that their loveless relationship was resulting in no benefit to her if we don’t count the time before she tried to leave him for a span of several months in the previous decade. The understanding that awakened me as a boy slowly revealed itself in association with other friends families as the years passed. Observing how other families cooperated was a huge wake up call for me because it gave me a sense on how other families negotiated their time and shared their love. The world became much bigger after realizing that people can treat each other in kind and loving ways. Overcoming the obstacles and transforming a life into something that every human being recognizes as beneficial in addition to making an ordinary life extraordinary was once the dream I wanted as a boy to achieve. Living in a world that brings us harsh lessons can mold a person into shaping a life of their own creation based on how they would like to live. Unfortunately realism often subdues the idealism of the younger mind that has not accounted for much of a life they would have wished to live and therefore does not accurately anticipate the unforeseen misgivings. We are not omniscient beings, we are human and thus render our decisions by way of learning in the experiences of everyday life, hence, we make mistakes. How we live with these mistakes are completely up to us. The secret of living in darkness is known all too well by those afflicted with depressive disorders. The horrible truth about such a condition is that many do not know why they are bound to these trepidations. If they do know, they know not how to put an end to the troublesome thoughts that hinder their lives. The agony of knowing about the causes of our failures can attribute much to the defeat of a persons self-image.
When the direction of a life takes on the weight of their own persecution, then it is harder to restrain the negative inner voice that takes control. Sometimes we feed the wrong inner voices that are inside our heads. When the direction of a life is forever changed due to the associations they have made, and leads them down a path that takes disastrous tolls on one’s inner fortitude, the outcome may too often be seen in real world misfortunes. The combination of successive failures and bad decisions under the rule of an oppressive psyche will often result in the downfall of the spirit unable to unchain itself from a fall that takes the soul away from the thought of a second chance. If the chances for redemption and penance is not seen to be a possibility, then so too is the chance for the spirit to be mended and will wander down the same meandering path it knows best. After years of turmoil, the soul looses its chance of hope and a brighter future ahead. The bleak and tainted living exists and perpetuates the bleak and undesirable outcome of a living in such conditions. The detachment from others on an emotional level was evident very early in my life. The intellectual goals became a vehicle to overcome what was experienced in grief and embarrassment growing up in that household, only to cause it’s own problems with unrealized goals and poor relationship choices later in adult life. The early conditioning of a boy can have some hard outcomes when the life is lived, and the lessons are not realized to their potential. If the conditioning is positive and reinforced with a loving message, the sky is the limit. On the other hand, if the conditioning is negative and with a senseless application of apathetic parental negligence, the outcomes can have disastrous effects upon the bestowed. The persistence of messages that play over and over despite new information that may come into being and present itself to a person, may indeed escape our attention. Sometimes the younger you are, the more hope you can subsist from, and the greater chance for you to get over the hurdles and bring in a new day with hope again. The older you are, the less likely you will have hope to get you through. After some hurdles continue to line up and remind you that maybe you are meant to find another hurdle to jump, and thus you become fixed in the idea that you are meant to live a life jumping hurdles with no end in sight, and this alone slows you down from wanting to jump. Of course we all know that life will have trials and “hurdles” that we all must face and negotiate; but when the count of hurdles becomes what appears to be an endless sea of them, it is then that we become numb. When you live with the idea of equity, and live therefore by a morality that is supposed to bring you some kind of karmic fortune, you have built an expectation around this thought. But if instead living this way only makes you become the target by people who prey off of your ameliorating ethic, than you have not learned the complete lesson. For those that have no or few manners, for those that do not believe in mutually beneficial social graces, the law of the jungle is fair game and living by those who try to dominate, or those who manipulate seems to be the default order of things for the unskilled mind that occupies much of the world. One can become worn down by living with the same mechanisms in play over a long period. They are bound to influence your navigational choices if you do not make course corrections and changes over time. But if you are unaware of any flawed perceptive ability, and the beliefs you form are based on these perceptions, then how do you correct that for what you do not know? If your lenses are smeared, then so is that of what you see in the world. If we believe in the image without correcting the lens errors, then we believe that to be the world we see. The senses can become dulled with pain, and therefore you are less open to be receptive to gifts from the universe. A universe that is able to give you what you may need when you may need it. Unfortunately we lose sight of what we need, and either start asking the wrong questions or we might ask for the wrong things that we don’t need. We become confused and complicate our issues within our minds. If the senses are dulled, we focus on the wrong ideas or we focus on the wrong internal voices that lead us down a road of futility. It is true that at times at our worst episodes of failure we awake and see clearly what must be needed to end the situation we are presently in. The example of when a drug addict awakens from a near death experience and sees the emptiness and vacuity of their situation. Remarkably they turn another page into a brighter future with a completely different path taken this time around. There are times when we align ourselves with the wrong ideas of how we should behave, or that we align ourselves with the wrong people that are not a good match for our spirit. Because of our frailties we choose poorly and connect to the wrong energies that attract us, as we do if we are abused in some way, we are often attracted to that trauma that caused us so much harm in the early stages of our lives. This is why many people somehow wind up with the people that have a familiarity about them, even when they are not sure why they become attracted to them in the first place. You can see it over and over in many relationships that are clearly based on other elements than what is right before you. The congruency of the attraction is not merely a physical one, but has a deeper connecting mechanism that binds people in ways they truly do not understand. It is as if we develop a sense about something in the other person that reminds us of past traumas that sometimes determine whether we continue to develop the relationship. Something that we sense without any rational thought, but rather some emotive piece that weaves into the fabric of our behaviors and we respond in kind to these people who spark this interest. Working out from that dilemma can take a lifetime to shake in many cases. One can walk among the examples of people known through-out their lives, and think back upon how lost some of these people seemed to be. At the time we possibly didn’t know the extent to which they may have suffered, but there was surely evidence that they did suffer when we think back hard enough. If we take notice of these incidents, and we remember that maybe we were just caught up in the times, or that we did not have any say into what others were doing with their lives because we were just trying to get by ourselves, than I can see that our awareness of something wrong was right, but we were not in any place to do anything about it anyway. They may have just been acquaintances and that we were not going to save them from anything since we did not have any influence over them. Most likely we did not view it as critically then as we may do so now from a retrospective analysis, but as the passage of time brings about many thoughts in a former life lived, one can have a deep connection to patterns of how we have navigated our journey’s to current day results. The meanings in what we do, the opportunities gained and lost, and the people we may have met that imparted these memories to us will often reside in our reflections. It is not so much the failure to make better decisions in your choices of friends and companions, because during those times you may have held enough positive spiritual energy to correct any possible outcomes if it goes south, rather what is more alarming is when you stop making connections, when you stop caring and become transfixed holding onto the negative energy that has overwhelmed your defense mechanism and has you left in a zombie-like state of being that is harder to contend with. More and more one cares not what others think. The superego, or the conscience, are subdued and skewed by these negative forces inflicted upon the psyche thereby minimizing valid judgements after these assaults take place. In a series of defeats within a lifespan, the mind itself weakens to the pressures of anxiety, stress, fear, and the maladaptive behaviors which are created out of the mixture of these psychological factors. I would like to venture a thought. If one’s mental state is disheveled, then the way one deals with their lives is also in accordance with the way they are thinking. Jaymes Joyce once said that “mistakes are the portals of discovery.” What he does not account for is one can only find those discoveries if and only if one is receptive to the information. The mind can become a prison, when you cannot figure out how to correct the errors made, when you become somehow attached to the trauma that you are trying to escape from by any means possible, then the cycle will perpetuate. The vicious circle revolves around the unwanted drama that is a result of the weakened mind state. A lifetime of reflection only makes matters convoluted with memory lapses and selective memories that haunt the bewildered mind hungry to learn more. Digging into the past can be constructive at times, but when you choose only those memories that are hard to escape from, and trying to select those moments that made you who you are today in search for answers that don’t come easy can be a troublesome venture and may become destructive. Something happened between those years growing up that I’d placed aside for many years. I’m not sure what the psychological message was that I found hard to master, overcome, subdue, or grow-out of, but it seems that those messages seem to haunt me in ways that sabotage any chance for a redemption when falling back into the mindset of a hurting small boy revisiting this former formidable foe. How could such a time disrupt the psyche for such a long time? Is it wounds that won’t heal because they seem to be reopened with every relationship failure that occurs, or is it that these relationship failures occur because of the rift received and trauma received back in those days of youth? Choosing a companion is an essential skill that is definitely effected by the messages learned from childhood. Being attracted to the wrong types of people will be a very hard thing to break when you cannot distinguish just who is the “wrong type” of person in the first place. Studies show in many psychological scenarios that we somehow are attracted to the trauma received in early childhood that was painful to undergo in the first place. I’m sure it has something to do with an attachment style of love modeled by parents as children grow up and much of what we learn from the enneagram theories. In Dr. Drew Pinsky’s 2003 book Cracked, he makes some very insightful conclusions from his practice experience. He notes that patients who have struggled with the effects of trauma suffered early in life, (when they were still developing the brain mechanisms that allow them to relate to other people and the world in general) are struggling because of the brain’s arrested development. The development was arrested at whatever age the trauma happened. Unable to trust, they grow up without a sense of self. Ultimately these people choose others in relationships that may make them “feel safe”, but still somehow manage to reenact traumatizations and reinforce the shame, guilt, and sense of self as a victim in their relationship cycles. Many of these patients will form additions or suffer extreme pain. Many of them learn to dissociate from these feelings to protect themselves further psychological impairment. Dissociation is the activation of a primitive region of the brain that we share with lower life forms. It’s basically the remnant of the mechanism that’s responsible for an animals feigning death when threatened. A child seeking out the affection of a family that does not return that affection can lead one to question the world in profound ways. Given the need for love and affection, the lack of it in one’s life, and the search for this fulfillment seemed to be a central theme that has shaped much of my experience. The disconnection from everyone in my family also hyper-accentuates this predicament and may be indicative of having little or no family support for contributing to healthy nourishment of the soul in the early formative years from birth to six years old. If you take away any hope, or any attribute that may mend some deeply felt injuries in a life, then the resulting outcome can have disastrous implications. It is usually the result of multiple losses experienced in many facets of a lifetime beginning from a childhood devoid of a nurturing affection, leading into forming romantic relationships that were problematic and flawed. If creative passions and past-times are extinguished such as no longer being able to perform activities you once enjoyed, you can see the result of limiting the happiness that can be experienced. If health issues are increasing, and educational goals are not completed out of sacrifices made for others are not mended, and if professional goals are augmented for faulty reasoning, then again a diminished experience of life will be felt. If ties to a family is torn apart from a divorce, and the ensuing alienation over a span of decades ensues, and the single most important passion is wanting a family connection, then you will feel the pain and misery of waking every day until you can create happy examples of a life to balance these unhappy memories. Therefore sequentially decimating these hopes and tribulations in our human connections, can lead to despair when profound losses lead to a sum total of a life not worth living. Lao-Tzu was quoted as saying that … New beginnings are often disguised as painful endings Again, when no “out” or “end” is seen by the observer, when no door or exit is visible, then the chance to gain a new environment cannot be achieved unless some other agency acts upon that dynamic. If the element of hope or faith is extracted from most social interactions that have pending emotional future implications for a person, than there is nothing else to rely upon in the accounting of human interactions. The feeling of belonging is central for one to exist and be a part of a community. When you feel that you do not belong, that somehow you do not fit, the chance for you to remain stable or strong or connect with others diminishes greatly within that community and with yourself if you cannot find others with like minds. Your wanting to belong will also slowly fade away, after years of denials and dejection’s believing that you only belong to lower forms of the social stratum because you have not managed to achieve any significant success in this area is highly probable. Social climbing is measured upon by which you have provided and earned passage into a material world of lifestyle and possessions. The material essence stripping away before you systematically by those around you will lead to erase the memory of you in everyone’s eyes, including your own, because you bought into the surface levels of this personna which is a false one. It does not complete you as a person, but you start to think that maybe it does. If you cannot overcome this challenge, you may possibly drop out of a life that will sustain you emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. You will possibly stop any search to better yourself, as you have been debased and began to believe in what the outside naysayers or the inside negative voices are saying. The energy that you use or live on takes much of the agony with living under such circumstances that your contemplation of ending everything becomes more of a reality. You stop producing good arguments and submit to bad ones, you give up and play victim, and thus defeated by an antagonistic force, you no longer have the strength or will to continue under these conditions. Failure must be overcome by mere perseverance when all other outlets are exhausted, when all other resources are diminished beyond capacity to realize them, and when nothing else seems to be a viable alternative, the outcome of successive failures just may be the reason for ending a life that is viewed as worthless. Looking at the social inventories that people often parade out to the public using social media to show others their accumulation of wealth, their accumulation of a lifestyle others may not be able to partake in, such as showing the luxuries of a lifestyle that seeks to communicate to others that they are seemingly happy to show off these trinkets of novelty and have a desire to show others their accomplishments of possessions, status, or possibly parading an attribute of emotional or spiritual success is a dual edged blade. Before the social media technological boom, kids were only able to show what they wore to school, what they drove to school, and where they lived via demonstration in personal contact. Parents were able to do this at work, or even showing the neighborhood the latest development within their own yard. Sharing this information to all was done by personal demonstration. Where you lived, where you went to school, where you benefited from having opportunities that others did not have were all on the table when the politics of kids would emerge from their gatherings. The world is now much more communicative in all the events of human narcissism, and in a world that promotes self excess, and ego-centered persona’s, the result can have negative impacts on everyone participating. The want to fit in seems to dominate the medium and ironically is what bonds many of us together. Aligning with people that can help you achieve and realize a better life, placing your trust into those that can lead you to a better way of life is truly rare when you consider all the other elements that impede, distract, and dissuade you from a pathway that you can depend on. After the departure of good friends, family, and others who were once in your circle, but have now moved away, or you have become separated or distanced from them for other reasons, and they have lost touch, then if you do not re-acquaint yourself with some other quality people, you may find a very lonely existence. Losses with no other noticeable gain can lead to despair. When you lose all that you love, there is little to compensate you for the losses you held close to your heart. You are in no condition to establish bonds with others to pull you out of the devastation you experience. Having nothing else to take solace in, you become embittered by a world that has taken away that what you held dear, or that world has not been able to provide in your opinion what you have been missing in life to make you happy and sustain you. The misfortune of not having a support system to lead you out from such desolate thoughts is a very sad situation indeed. Not having a word to steer you onto another path when you have lost an effective path is tragic but is so common in the world. Perhaps it is that you have not been receptive to the messages that are provided by those around you, rather, you tend to ignore these since your mind is not clearly focused and is caught in a battle of fuzzy clouded thoughts vs the clear factual information that can lead you to make better decisions and avoid much of the chaos that is a by-product of your interactions. If you continue to fail, and do not learn from your prior mistakes, then one must be able to forgive themselves or there is zero chance to overcome the malaise of their making. One must reach out at some point and manifest their own destiny, but the cost to do so is to awaken from the fog of the unclear mind that is enchained by a tortured past that catches one in a vicious cycle if you continue to think about it as you have usually done. Thus you never will heal and become caught up in the circle of pain from your own creation since what has happened before is allowed to happen again and again at your own guilt or painful memory that is allowed to live and thrive again within a worn and wearisome soul. The selective dark memories of the past always seem to keep me in perpetual unrest. Have I become addicted to sorrow? Can I not liberate myself from this past toil that consumes my present attention today? If I can filter these troubling memories, than I can place my full attention on my life in the moment? From the cradle to the casket, we must carry the burdens of being human. We can transcend the past, living only in the present moments we experience now.
Memory When I was a boy, my father would make sure my brother and I would play baseball in a local league. I don’t think I really had any wish, nor my brother, but we somehow were just part of these sports teams that include some of the few family photo opportunities that are still in existence in the family albums. Playing in a family with a sports fanatical father did not give any pleasure to me or my brother since none of us had any aspirations during the later years of our lives that dealt with professional team sports. It was during the Nineteen-Seventies, and I happened to be on a team where a coaches son also happened to play the same position I usually played. A position that was a direct result of having a father that thought this position was one of great importance for a baseball team to have; that of the catcher. But because of the powers that be, I wound up playing first base for some of the games that we played on that team if memory serves correctly during that season. I remember that during one game, my father was in the stands, my team was on the field, and I was on first base. I remember it was a major’s game, from the field we were playing on, and that the crowd was of fairly good size. There was a direct hit down the middle of first base and second base that I was able to field. Unfortunately that ball took a very nasty hop as I ran in front of it to intercept it on the infield, and it struck me directly on the mouth missing my extended glove to catch it. Since I wore braces in those days my lips were shredded from the hardball striking me with a great force of impact. I don’t know just how the play ended, but what I do remember is the crowd reaction and that of my father’s. Thinking back it could not have looked that good. I was spitting blood and it hurt like hell, but I don’t remember anyone coming to check on me and I don’t even know if they were considering a replacement. I was in pain, but I had to keep up because I had to tough-it out due to who I was and the times in which we played. I was my father’s boy, and I knew he was in the crowd. So I waited in pain, as the game was paused briefly from the injury that fell upon me. The coaches and the umpire did not really know what to do moments after the event, but a voice from the crowd spilled out over everyone onto the field. A voice that did not consult me, a voice that I was intimately familiar with, It was the voice of my Dad. He shouted …”Let him Play!” It was a voice that wanted to show the rest of the crowd that I was tough enough to play, and I should still play despite the bleeding and the injury I sustained. I do not know of any father that would advise that for their young boy after an injury like that, if they did not consult or inspect the person injured, but that is what I had to live with. I played the rest of the game in utter misery, because that was the wish of a father who probably gave no thought about how serious the injury was, and placed more thought on what others would think if I did not continue to play.
~Journal Entry~ Many memories come to mind during this time in my life. Much happened since I was 7 to the time I was 17 years old. A decade that provokes many painful and joyous times, yet my memories of the joyous times were fewer than I would have preferred. My overall nature was naive which gave rise to a bit of optimistic hope at heart but also tied a very shy and uncertain demeanor of my abilities due to the oppressive nature of my family history I surmise. The optimism came from my imagination and probably the influence of my naiveté. I don’t think I was as negative then as I have become in my later years. I believe whole-heartedly that my experience with people who have used and taken advantage of my natural open nature, has led to some poor decisions on my part in dealing with them effectively and justly. My betterment would come in the aid of experience and learn from these encounters, but it must also be tied directly to a stronger self-esteem that would protect my inner self from troubles that have come in the form of exterior and anterior motives from others be them accidental or intentional I know not. I must admit that my reading past journal entries comes an epiphany of my own solitude and misfortune that I have largely contributed to these encounters going into them partly blinded, and partially opened eyed! I have yet to analyze this in detail, but my overall conception is that my growth/demise comes in many shapes and forms. I see there are noticeable differences in the past several decades and my relation to them is correlational to my culpability. Though I find that many of these have a similar pattern, it is also noted that the decade in which they are found has unique circumstances that bring about their possibilities to begin with. The course of my life has made me reflect too much on things others take for granted, or is it that they do not anguish as I do over the things that take my mind away from the better parts of life? I have had no affirmative answer to question this for over the last 40+ years of my life. When the lightning bolt struck my mind those fateful days in class, a grand epiphany in my life when I pondered those moments in Professor Wheatcroft’s classroom in Grossmont College concerning the BPL or Best Possible Life, my entire outlook on life was enveloped with a crystal clear view of what I wanted to learn and live by; that of being an enlightened person. The ethics class, and the introduction to Philosophy changed or rather refocused my mind on the same things I had always been asking since as long as I can remember. Growing up in an environment, starved for affection, knowledge, love, peace, and autonomy was a hellish place to be. Having no communication about self-worth and affirmations from family left me in turmoil. If you have not any sustenance in nurtured cultivation, you then become lost. To be influenced in whatever the direction of the wind takes you is the first inclination, unless you can find stability within yourself to navigate another path. Many of us have to face challenges through out our lives. It simply must be a truth to say that the more love, respect, acceptance, and good behavioral example an individual receives as a child; it is more likely that they will be better off in becoming good human beings for the following stages of life. I think statistically the converse is also true, though I do believe in anomalous extraordinary circumstances and possibilities for this not to necessarily occur. The true hero’s are those that despite their circumstances in life, rise up above it and become better human beings. I believe that there were times I rose above my circumstances and choose to be better. I also believe that I have also fallen far below my potential and have been crippled by my “achilles heal” and resorted to poorly executed coping strategies that have kept me in a bête noire state , silenced my better nature, and to an extent kept me in a perpetual prison of sorts. With a disposition of being alone, or only being able to rely on my own sensibilities, I’ve made some discoveries and made some mistakes on my reliance of other people and myself. I’ve never liked deceptions, or other factors that bring about the bad in people, especially those that are not of maturity, or desire to become better than they are. I’ve learned that selfishness and other such faulty human ego-attributes are problematic and unnecessary. They don’t have any valuable payoff in the long run, but are so often utilized by so many for different reasons. I would not be honest if I did not admit to having such problems myself from time to time. When new experiences begin to happen, and you can forget, or move on from past injuries, then you can build upon and create a new life full of hope and begin new experiences that will develop you further. The mid nineteen-eighties were a time for dramatic change, and a huge development was transpiring, but it was not sustained, and somehow led to the failures of dreams once made for education and for employment.
~Journal Entry~ Why do I think sometimes that I was raised as a single child? How many of my early memories do I have that leads me to believe this? Why do I sometimes think my experience in the world is of being alone and having no siblings to share it with?
My isolation must have started early in my life since my ambivalence of my situation became a part of my experience in the world. Is this reactionary coping mechanism or is it hard-wiring my brain to view the world as such by the lens of my distorted view of the world. How much truth can a child absorb before the hand of adults curb the experience by thoughts, rituals, habits, and customs? My memories of my past are made up of numerously filled visions of world in which I was “ALONE!” I had others around me, but my experience in the moment, was filled with times when I was all by myself in a reflection of thought in the past. I was doing something, but entertaining myself, or having a distinct memory of being by myself in an activity for myself seems to be the prevalent theme on such past memories. Why? My mom rarely worked, my father never went out at night, my brother could not have been that active in earlier ages, yet I seem to have these memories of such isolation from a family that was not connected in a any meaningful or loving way. Only in ritual and habit did we gather, often at the evening dinner counter where we were scolded or humiliated by dad for doing nothing other than looking in a direction at him in the wrong time. Mom never ate with us either. She just served us, often eating at others times. How I remember the solitude so vividly is that all of us probably isolated away from the dire consequences of living with a man who was selfish and demoralizing it left an indelible impression upon us. Anger and oppression were the prevailing characteristics of a family structure rife with atrocities occurring in the early family of which we were a part of. It is of little wonder that I have so many memories of escaping the iron clad ruling dictator that shaped much of my experience during my childhood. My only liberation must have been escape form such forms of abusive behavior that led me into a life of searching for another way to be. A life devoted to a better understanding that one could be without fear, torment, or humiliation. A life that unfortunately has led to my condition of overwhelming doubt and skepticism that has affected my vision. As I stroll down memory lane, I find myself distorting my experience with old ones, occupying my mind with thoughts of earlier days that disallows me to occupy my mind in the moment today; NOW!
I cannot help but try to reflect back, so that I may correct the now thinking, ironically this is just how I have done things. I cannot totally give up my search in this way, but may someday choose to abandon this framework and choose to live in the now with better thoughts, a better life, a better experience of the now. Opening up the past has been practiced for as long as psychology was founded and most likely predates that to the beginning of man itself. The enlightened ones have escaped this cycle of constant regurgitation, but some value may lie within, or at least to the beginning student wanting to find out about a better way to live, or a better way to experience the world and his own reflections may be causeway to this revelation. The notion of becoming must have roots in the examination of the self on some level. Getting beyond this point is the trick of the Eastern mind overcoming the obstacles of the self, and the human condition, whereas for the Western mind it would usually include a thorough examination to uncover the ailments that would prevent the growth of the individual / the community / or the world. I remember awaiting Christmas, and in the eve of Christmas week in the early 70’s, I have some distinct memories with mom in the kitchen, but my brother and Dad nowhere to be found. Dad was probably at work, and my Bro? No idea where he was, and for that matter, much of these memories are vacant of any reflections of him being in the house. Its possible that he was just in his room, and such, but it seems so many of these early memories exclude any activities with him, and that I was alone in a house where I would escape into my own mind for recreation, or when I was unable to go outside, I would take refuge in the comic book or possibly music record, or that of a book. I’m sure that I must of at some time played with my brother, but as it turns out I have no recollections of these events, and thus the separation of our lives begins early on, and the fact that he is so detached, and that I have been so detached throughout my life only makes this argument become more credible. I have not spoken to him about such matters, but I don’t think his memory will give me much of a result since I am very mistrustful of his vision as it is. He often reflects back painting his emotions and thoughts with the current pattern He holds to this day. So he is tainting the picture, or embellishing the memory with ideas of “how it may have been”, due to his take on the world. Is my vision so removed that I cannot see the forest through the tree
I kept my vigil where the shadows bled. . The boy in me still tastes the iron thread. . My father’s thunder crowned my every breath. . He shouted “Let him play!” to bargain with my death. . I learned that pain was proof that I belonged. . I wore my silence till the seams went wrong. . The crowd looked on, a faceless, distant shore. . I swallowed every wave and asked for more. . I grew on gravel, watered once by fear. . I called it love because no love was near. . The house became a doctrine made of fists. . We prayed to keep from landing on his lists. . My mother bent herself to save his name. . Her trembling spine still took the weight of blame. . I watched her trade her heartbeat for his peace. . I learned to call my own collapse “release.” . So loss arrived before I knew the word. . A flock of exits darkening the world. . Each decade stamped its verdict on my chest. . The scales kept breaking under each new test. . I chased a life that once was only light. . The Best Possible flickering out of sight. . I read the saints, and drew a careful chart. . But every arrow circled back to “start.” . My journals are a graveyard made of ink. . Each page a mile I walked along the brink. . I questioned God, and karma, and the lens. . Why kindness marks you out for crueler friends. . I loved like someone begging at a gate. . I chose the ones who spoke my native state. . They smelled like home: contempt and sudden cold. . I knelt before the pattern and grew old. . I called it fate, but it was just my view. . A smeared glass making every sorrow true. . I trained my mind to catalogue each scar. . Until I wore them like a zodiac of stars. . Some nights I think I’m only made of bruise. . A body built from everything I lose. . I scroll the lives of those who seem complete. . Their golden afternoons, my empty seat. . The world applauds the ones who always win. . I clap along, a ghost outside their skin. . Yet still a whisper lingers in my chest. . A small defiance no defeat can wrest. . It says: your wounds are not the final word. . The boy who bled is not what must be heard. . So I will stand inside this broken frame. . And name my darkness without bowing to its name. . From cradle ache to casket’s closing art. . I drag this cross and still protect my heart. . If I must live bewildered, half-undone. . Then let my suffering shelter more than one. . I send this trembling signal through the night. . To say: you are not alone inside this fight. . We are the children no one came to save. . Who learned, at last, to climb out of the past
We speak in circles to appear profound. Our logic wobbles, yet we stand our ground. . We color words in ideological hue. Then swear the tint itself makes truth come through. . We point at straw men, watch them burn with ease. Declare our virtue on the social breeze. . A sound bite dances, dressed in formal wear. It struts through headlines, basking in hot air. . What’s substance now, if phrased in clever jest? The form is worshiped, meaning dispossessed. . Ad hominem, our daily bread of spite. A tasty feast where reason loses sight. . We sculpt our arguments with plastic grace. A smile can hide the cracks beneath the face. . Emotion rules — the crowd will cheer or boo. For truth is dull; they want a bolder view. . We weaponize the clause, distort the clause. Applause! Applause! We never mind the cause. . Our graphs and charts perform a masquerade. They bow to bias, empirically unfrayed. . False syllogisms waltz across the floor. They lead the blind to claim they see much more. . We duel with data mined from murky swamps. Each swamp, of course, is where belief still romps. . Oh sophist, patron saint of every spin. You teach us how to lose and call it win. . We say “both sides” while hiding in the smoke. The middle burns — the audience the joke. . We love our tribal logos, neat and bright. They glow so much we never see the night. . And through it all, intent becomes disguise. We sell mistruths, then buy our own supplies. . But under rhetoric’s perfumed deceit, There lies a hunger simple and discreet. . To speak in clarity — to shape a thought. Free from deceit, unbent, unsold, unbought. . Let language serve to forge the lucid flame. To name the world, not gild it with acclaim. . For truth requires no costume, mask, or fight. It stands in humble syllables of light. . And should we seek to truly solve, not sway, We’ll drop the tricks — and plainly say our say.
You must be logged in to post a comment.