Life and Times of a Flying Fox

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Universal Truth

    Today I was once again confronted by my greatest fear.
    It underlies everything that terrifies me, it undermines my confidence and whatever purpose I have ever found, and it has lived in the back of my mind for nearly 7 years.
    And today I looked at it with the dispassionate observation of someone so used to something morbid, it no longer elicits fear or revulsion from them.
    It has been thus for a good while now. When you live with a monster for as long as I have, it becomes familiar to you. In its familiarity, it becomes a part of you, and you can look upon it as if viewing one of your limbs or a piece of furniture in your house that has always been there.
    I looked at it today, and the questions that it poses, and I believe I have found the answer, albeit within the cradle of other questions, or concerns, that bring their own discord. But it is an answer I can believe with all my being, and in that way, it brings me some peace.
    A universal truth that frees me in part from my own vices, and connects me to the world at the same time.

    I am afraid to not exist.
    I am afraid that nothing will exist - and the speculation that the universe has a lifespan, fragile as scientific knowledge might be in the face of time and new discoveries, confirms that fear as legitimate in its own capacity - and that everything that we are, that we did, will be forever gone.
    This fear has made me sick.
    This fear has caused me pain, some nights it would rend my stomach like a black hole opened up inside of me and I would be kept up at night with the pain and grief. Other times it would trigger such extreme anxiety attacks that I would not be able to stop vomiting for close to 15 minutes, even when there was nothing left inside of me, as if I hoped to purge myself of the fear itself with enough violent convulsions.
    This fear has left me desolate and brittle. It crushed the foundation of my world and I almost went insane from the effort it took to rebuild that foundation from scratch - discarding or repurposing shards of beliefs and ideals and purpose that had fortified me for most o my life. There were times when I would shake with silent screams in the dead of night and wallow in anguish so frigid that it would numb me to all emotion after a time, and the only thing that kept me alive was the tiny spark of my animal instinct to survive. I would pick myself up, feeling spent and dry, allow the small part of me that appreciates dark cynical humor to take over for a moment, and apply myself to the simplest of tasks, just to stay alive.
    Just to keep existing. For all its futility, and for all its fragility, because the most primal, feral part of me, the legacy of my species, derived from the culmination of time and circumstance that created the first life to emerge from the oozing pools of proteins across the precursor to our planet, was telling me to survive; to eat, drink, breathe, move my limbs, satisfy the savage lust or instincts that surfaced in the absence of my humanity, and engage in the fight for life every plant, every creature, everything that is swept up in the process of life, has fought for a span of time so great that I cannot truthfully admit to comprehending it.
And once I regained my reason and could apply it to the whole of what I am, I realized those instincts were right.

I have since battled to survive against parts of my own humanity. Indeed, my ability to ask lofty questions and my knowledge of self-awareness often seemed like a curse. This was what truly made me a misanthrope, for beyond my established beliefs that people exercise too much cruelty or, worse, apathy, was the realization that our own unique ability to reason, to fathom, and to explore - our own humanity - has caused most of our suffering throughout our history. If not for my fear of the void, and my own strong instincts, I might have taken my own life just to rid myself of such implications.
    And such implications, as well as many others, stemming most often from this one fear of mine, have changed me immensely.
    It is that change which I have sought to undo for almost as long as this inner war with my fear has gone on.
    And it is this desire I must now renounce in the face of my latest epiphany.

    Not a single thing you can do or say to a person can make you or them return to what you were. Not any revelation of the workings of the universe can return you to where you started, or reverse damage. No act of damage control, by any group or nation, can truly erase the scars of hardship and strife from the slates of our histories.
    No one can go back.
    I cannot find the peace I desire that I once had before this all started; the certainty of my purpose; my unwavering faith in my beliefs, spiritual or otherwise; my hubris the likes of which the young possess who believe they are irreplaceable. These things were mine once, they can never be mine again.
    We cannot go backwards because we cannot unmake what we have wrought. We cannot erase our mark.
    We do leave a mark.

The consequences of my struggle have not remained isolated to myself; they have effected others, directly or otherwise, and we all effect the world, perhaps even the cosmos. One of the first truths I gleaned when I started this journey of potentially self-destructive enlightenment was that time is a human abstract that we created around...around change. Change, which is the only true constant in the universe, and yet I never realized until now the implications of what that meant. It remained obscured to me for years, perhaps because my own dogged obsession with undoing the damage I caused myself blinded me to it, or perhaps because I was not yet wise or developed enough to appreciate it.
Or maybe I needed to suffer these experiences to really understand it in more than just an intellectual capacity.
I must abandon this thing that I have lamented over, because only then can I open my heart to the truth.
We do exist.
Our world does exist.
    Our sun exists. It was born from a culmination of gases and plasma reactions.
    Our galaxy does exist. It came to be formed as the gravity from a dead star drew other celestial bodies toward it.
    Our universe does exist. Its origin is a mystery to us, and yet here we are, living inside of it, which we have vague ideas about its nature and continue to speculate on its birth - and its death.

    Everything exists in one form or another. Our corpses serve to feed other life forms and sometimes are transmuted in the fashion only nature itself can perpetrate. Our fetuses are formed from the union of two members of the opposite sex and the offspring carry remnants of both parents - scars of their own, in a manner of speaking.
Clouds exist, they empty themselves when it rains, the heat from the sun resurrects them from the water. An empty sky is not proof that clouds do not exist, for all one would need to do is glimpse a puddle to know that at a previous tie, they had.
Everything in nature effects nature itself. What mark I, my race, my planet, will leave is not something I can know, but I do believe there will be one, great or small, for that is the most absolute law of nature, the universal truth.

That is one less monster I must contend with.

Friday, August 7, 2015

My friend's story

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Double-Edged Sword

    It is not unknown to those close to me that I feel the most productive way to get past misunderstandings or conflicts is to share my feelings and understand something of theirs - in fact, it is probably the only way I can understand people at all, and my only means of relation, which isn't unknown to most of my friends either.

    So, on one such occasion, early in the morning, when most people with proper obligations would likely be asleep, a friend of mine and I worked out our...differences...about a situation that arose a few weeks ago that had been eating at me - and given that was a night when I had nothing better to do but seethe in the mire of every bitter resentful thought I'd ever had in relation to my family (of which there are many, but objectively, there are many other thoughts associated with many other emotions as well, they just weren't at the forefront of my mind at the time), it came to the surface again and I could not hold it down.

    We did work it out, but she said something to me that made me totally aware of why I was so indignant on the topic in the first place, something I subconsciously knew was wrong for years, and which I attempt to rectify as often as I can, but until I heard it spoke plainly, I wasn't able to produce a concise explanation. Indeed, it seems my friend said in a single sentence what I had been trying to convey to her for over 3 hours.

"I'm not going to praise you like a dog for it."

    Without context, this likely means very little, so I will offer what I hope is concise. I have not had an easy life, it isn't a unique occurrence, but it isn't normal either. I grew up in a house where my mother resented me - or rather, the fact that she had me, and all the implications that brought along with it - and grandparents determined to pretend nothing was wrong, that we cared for each other deep down, and that any protest I raised about my mother was just the usual things kids say about their parents. It is not unusual for a child to tell their parents they hate them at least once - it is, however, unusual for their parents to express mutual feelings at least twice. The only reason I remained with my biological relatives was because getting an abortion or later giving me up for adoption would make my grandparents disown my mother and thus cut off a vital lifeline since we were, to put it bluntly, shit poor and barely able to afford transportation.

    For the record, my mother isn't an indecent person, she swallowed what she could of her resentment and tried to take care of my physical and medical needs to the best of her ability, in fact, that's why we ended up in the most ghetto part of town living off stale bread and cereal, because when we lived with my grandparents who owned a lot, lived in a clean trailer, and had 3 proper meals a day, we were seen as too rich for the government to give a damn about us but the fact remained we were too poor to help ourselves so a lot of the blame for my shitty childhood can be blamed on the system and not necessarily on my mother. (Although I doubt very seriously she needed to hit so hard, especially with such blunt, heavy objects.)

    So it was that, since kids are more attuned to feelings than older humans are, I grew up feeling the vibes of a mother that offered almost nothing in the way of emotional support or affection, and since I was forced to accompany my grammy to her day job every weekday since I was 2, and her day job was unfortunately a daycare where I had to share whatever dosage of affection I could manage to steal with 20-30 other kids, who I ended up deeply resenting myself for this reason, that I ended up getting in a lot of fights, and thus came home almost every day with my grandmother having some new complaint of whose hair I pulled or who I threw off the fort or how many kids I cornered in the sandbox like a rabid wolverine, and after a while, it just became easier for someone to mention when I went a whole day without terrorizing anyone - although my grammy would still mention every incident at the table because she loves to complain about her kids. I think it's genetic.

    And I never reserved this for daycare, and later, school, either. I noticed how much more everyone liked my cousin. My grandmother denies it, even today, of course, but my mother always says he wasn't always yelling and screaming and trying to hit everyone, which I've always believed to be the result of the fact that he had a parent that loved him regardless of how inebriated she became so I took out my bitterness on him as well and to this day my grandmother denies I ever did that, too.

    It isn't hard to imagine how school went for me - pretty much the same, except now I was willing to go to more extremes to inflict pain onto others for the sake of potentially alleviating some of my own. Didn't help I went to the worst middle school where broken glass and chipped wood were often concealed weapons in the halls. Even the kid who needed 2 crutches to get around could fight, and you wouldn't want one of those connecting with your jaw. I'd know. There wasn't a person in that place I hadn't tried to - quite literally - take a chunk out of, but by highschool I became sullen and stayed inside my head mostly. I would still attack others, but only in self-defense. I decided, at that age, I was tired of people. They never offered me what I wanted, although I had no idea what that was until junior year, when I experienced it for the first time - love.

    By the time I found the internet and some semblance of a refuge (although admittedly not a very secure one) from the things I hated most about people I was already used to having a glacier for a soul, I went without meaningful relationships for so long that the first couple times I experienced real friendship online it hurt, not unlike how frostbite feels when exposed to warmth, and lashed out in every direction having no other understanding how to act to new and confusing feelings. It turned out I became just as unpopular online as I already was in real life, and it was starting to make me hate myself quite a lot, and I struggled for a long time with trying to figure out what was wrong with me, why I didn't have things like emotional support or reliable presences, but there's probably another blog post in this menagerie of thoughts detailing that struggle and it would take another 6 paragraphs to go over it again anyway.

    So, along with a lot of other things I came out of that experience with, one of the things I realized was that criticism has been a pretty strong point in my life. My mother preferred to ignore me, although she would break from that to sometimes yell at me for getting into trouble in school because she hated getting calls from those people and being dragged away from other things to go talk to them in school (she danced a little at graduation because she could finally take them off speed dial and I swear I saw her giving double birds to the college doors we used for the ceremony when we were heading for the parking lot) and the teachers themselves had all kinds of complaints about me. if it wasn't my reign of terror (especially in elementary school) it was my lack of speed at work, my refusal to do some things set in front of me (I regret nothing of that one, by the way), or my outspoken dislike of some subjects such as math. The only thing anyone did like about me was that I was honest, I suppose because it made it easier to land me in a heap of trouble, but had the backfiring effect of me telling almost every teacher I had how much I didn't like them and why. (Probably the only thing in elementary school my mother was ever proud of.)

    On top of this, I at some point made the horrible mistake of getting into the creative mediums. It was music first, but as I didn't have the aptitude for reading it, it was not encouraged by my band teacher, or my mother, who majored in music at university and assured me I would never even qualify for half the classes she took. Then I tried art, thinking I'd have liked to make video games. At the time I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted in games that have ironically come to pass today. (Namely, sandbox and simulation games, as meta has always been my way of having fun) and started taking it seriously in 8th grade, only to find out largely through highschool and online interaction just how much of a beatdown that was asking for. I don't think I went a day in sophomore year without getting torn a fresh new one by either an art teacher or some prat online about everything under the sun from my poor anatomy to the content I drew (fanart, mostly) to my use of color (the usual complaint being "too much") to line thickness, and at first I lashed out at people as always, but ended up meeting a lot more resistance than before, maybe it was just because this was something I wanted to succeed at and I thought the whole firing off at people thing wasn't helping so I eventually learned to take it in stride and deal with its aftermath privately or to my friends.

    But in my adulthood, I cannot help but think I have endured too much criticism with too little praise.

    Anyone who's known me for any length of time is intimately aware the kinds of things I struggle with, even when the catalyst for those things is years bygone and what remain are shadows that still haunt me. It would be nice to be told, sometimes, by my friends at least, that I am making an effort to deal with a lot of deep-seeded issues, of which I only covered one in this post, to be told that I'm making headway, preferably as more than an afterthought so it doesn't come across as insincere. Few people bother to offer me that courtesy up-front, I can only think of two who have, and one of them was involved in that original discussion.

    That was what I felt so indignant about; that I have tried, and still put forth a great deal of effort, to resist or ignore the developed habits or instincts that have made me insufferable in the past. It takes a great deal of effort for me to drop whatever I'm on about and let someone else vent for a while. It takes a lot of self-control to compose my fury into concise sentences, I would like a little appreciation for what I have already accomplished over the years instead of being told that my effort is not good enough or that I still have a long way to go before I will be acceptable to others.

    It is this that makes me think we humans are too quick to criticize others but doling out praise rarely crosses our minds. I have been guilty of this injustice myself, and as someone who hangs out largely in creative circles, I see it from others first hand. I think more effort needs to be taken, on the parts of everyone, to balance out our criticisms with our praise.

    Why? Because imagine working hard on something like a painting, a video game, or self-improvement, and only to be told when you're doing something wrong, and never have potentially months of effort recognized. Imagine if everyone went silent when they couldn't think of anything to criticize you on. Would you not start to feel that your effort has been wasted, having not received any affirmatives from others? No, that is not conceited to desire or even except, it is human nature. We are social creatures, we need the approval of others to feel good about ourselves, it is why we desire friends in the first place, it is why we do much of what we do outside the basics for maintaining our health, it is why we become depressed if we feel unwanted.

    So, I take it upon myself to practice some things in my everyday life in an attempt to give to others what was denied me for so long.

    The first thing I do, and I view this as the most important, is to try and point out something good about someone's effort. Though I primarily practice this in the creative circles, it can be applied to many other things as well, and it helps to pay attention to he good traits about your friends when adopting this habit as it makes it so you can offer them honest approval when they're really down on themselves.

    The second thing I try to do, although my lack in some skills or fields of studies can hinder me on this one, is when I don't like something, I attempt to explain why, and offer an alternative. The latter is the hardest part and sometimes involves composing an answer for several minutes or leaving it for later. This is something I really wish more people would do, because my perspective is only one, and someone else with more knowledge about how some things work might come along and offer a better, or at least a different, one, but even so, it can be heartening for people to see that someone even cares enough to explain themselves instead of shouting in all caps about some new feature or update they hate or some use of color that hurts their eyes, or some way of behaving they find offensive.

    The last thing I try, and this is likely the hardest one for me, and one which I often have difficulty abiding by given my bent to take a view and go with it full-throttle, is to tell people that what I am saying is what I feel, what I think, and a lot of other I statements. It should be a given that whatever someone says is their opinion "by virtue of the fact they fucking said it" (a quote I picked up on a forum that tends to have a lot of nasty opinions being thrown around like spears) but this is not always apparently to everyone and I think it helps jolt them to the realization that they don't need to take all advice to heart, but there's no harm in mulling it over either.

    It is also important to realize that criticism, while it can be helpful, is often used, especially now in the age of information, as a weapon against people. There are many people who will shout it to the rooftops just to hurt someone or disguise insults and threats under the pretense of offering criticism. I assume that at least a few such individuals will come across this and since I have only ever met 2 people who are truly unaffected by what others think or say about them, I'm going to assume such people have emotions and feelings like everyone else so I offer to those people a warning.

    Criticism, especially destructive criticism, is a double-edged sword. You might be able to dish it out, but that doesn't mean you can take it. Most of my life has been spent in spite, I am no stranger to vindictive motives, I have been on both ends of them more often than is considered sane by most people, and I can tell you that while you're loading that shot you want to take at someone's weak point, there is always someone on the next hill trying to get a bead on you, and people like me - and there happen to be a great deal of us, especially online - take a sick and twisted delight from tearing into people who are just trying to be harmful. Unless you want to dedicate yourselves to being bulletproof, which I can tell you as someone who has tried is a pursuit that takes years and even then can never truly be realized, it is not worth whatever grim satisfaction you gain from hurting another person to risk alerting the ever-present snipers to your existence and potentially making yourself a target. You don't believe me? What do you think is the largest motivation of people posting articles about others on ED? Granted, not even I'm that vindictive, but it just goes to illustrate there are far nastier people out than me looking for an excuse and someone making an ass of themselves offers the perfect one.

    To everyone else, remember that block of text up there, because even if you're not like that, it should serve to demonstrate that criticism is a double-edged sword. Never offer it unless you're prepared to take it yourself, and in those instances, having a little praise on your record might encourage others to pay you the same courtesy. That is, after all, why we bother with courtesies to begin with. It can only improve our species to recognize the strengths of others as well as their weaknesses.

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

No longer using Gamasutra

http://i.imgur.com/d2RW5gS.png

    I feel like this needs explaining since apparently a lot of people don't get it. I never use my real name. Paranoia is only part of it. The biggest reason is that I hate it. It carries weight for me that I cannot bear and one of the best things about the internet to me is the ability to get a clean slate without a hundred preconceived notions about my character, not all of them unjustified.

    As far as I'm concerned, it is my right to choose who I am; even if that means throwing away everything I was - or trying to. Even without the use of my government-recognized identity that shit still haunts me and is always coming up. I have a hard enough time as it is trying to function with so much shame and self-hatred, I shouldn't have to be forced to carry every mistake I've ever made around like a fucking badge and never be able to redeem myself.

    Assuming it's even possible to be redeemed, considering how I've tried for years and still cannot be the kind of person I want to be.

    My life sucks enough, I really don't need it to suck more.

I place no value on how we are born or what we are given anyway. All that matters to me is what we do.My name, my ethnicity, my culture, my birthplace, my age, my gender, and whatever else was forced on me without my consent are meaningless. They are also meaningless to me in other people. I don't give a damn what name your parents gave you, what color you are, or where you grew up. Whatever part of you they make up is too insignificant for me to consider judging you by them even partially, and I damn sure don't respect them as a point of pride or shame. If you're proud to be black, or female, or from Canada, that just tells me that you have not accomplished anything meaningful enough to be proud of, or that you're clinging to a label like a fucking highschool kid.

    To my knowledge, most of us are gestated in a womb and each one is equipped with its own unique variety of shit sandwich dispensers that we're forced to eat as soon as our cells start dividing. Most of life is spent dealing with the aftertaste, and I think that's wrong. I rip the outward identities aside and give people a chance to define themselves by their choices and their actions and to hell with anyone who cannot see the wisdom in this.

    The bottom line is I'm tired of this shit, I will not participate in any community or group that values such superficial things and personally think anyone that does value them is shallow and beneath contempt. Call me when you fuckers finish puberty.

Friday, March 28, 2014

Embers

    Yesterday I shared my thoughts with a group of friends about anger, how I believe it's like a flame that, when not used up immediately, will seed itself into the hearts of those who kindled it and become a burning ember, hot enough to hurt its benefactor but tame enough to never go out, it will singe and crackle and deteriorate them from the inside out, and it will flare up when other emotions are fed to it, and it is very, very hard to dislodge once seeded in the human soul.

    I sometimes feel I was born with such an ember, like I was born angry, disquieted, full of an unending raging fire that drives the engine of my hate and which rarely lets me feel peace. Even now, I can feel it in my heart as it simmers and makes my chest and stomach feel hardened by heat. I can feel the constant turmoil as smoke of unease rise from it and yet never smother it as they build up inside of me, and my only outlet is that sometimes, I need to blow off steam to keep it from festering. I have kindled such a fire my entire life, I do not know what it's like to never be angry, save for a few times in my life where I felt like it might be truly gone - but not gone, just at its lowest burning point when I knew what contentment and tranquility were.

    Such is the nature of my being that I contemplate anger and rage often, I am very familiar with all manner of dark emotions, I am especially sensitive to and understanding of fear; fear drives people like nothing else, in many of our positive traits there is a shadow of fear, looming as we strive to not fail, to achieve before our short stints into the universe we call our lives run out, and the thing which we at the moment cannot possibly begin to fathom but which makes us more than the sum total of our parts diminishes forever and we become nothing but a resource to be used by the rest of the earth, recycled back into what I believe the true order of the universe. Fear has driven people insane, but it has also resulted in many achievements by mankind, it is the seed with which we might know understanding and empathy for others, it is the growing anxiety that promotes action and thought to overcome our hardships, and it is through fear that we come to know courage; true courage is to overcome a fear to accomplish a goal, to rise above it, without fear there can be no bravery, no progress, no courage, it is the darkness t our light.

    But more than fear, the shadow behind us all, behind everything we do, making stark the contrast of the light, I know anger. I am an embodiment of burning rage, I am hate incarnate, behind my fear is always the heat of anger, its dim burning light suffusing the shadows and the light, and through this smoky light and heat I have come to know fire. Fire burns and sways whimsically, fire cannot be contained, it cannot be controlled, it must be respected or tempered, but it has great potential for destruction, and it is wild, so wild that when it unleashes its true power it can devastate everything around it, it can grow and flare out so much that it cannot control itself, it no longer has direction, except to burn and consume and grow and unleash its wrath on everyone and everything in its wake, and it is so absorbed in its hot rage that it loses any cohesion or sanity, and when nothing is left, it burns out, extinguished by its own fury, defeated by its own mad consumption of everything around it, a smouldering shadow of its former self, a black smattering of embers.

    And yet those embers live, and they cannot be extinguished easily, as if fueled by some infinite supply of napalm they burn through the smoke and the blackened world the fire left behind, and they bide their time and grow, they grow into new fire and that fire continues to gain strength and momentum, and only the gods know when it will turn from its dancing whimsy into the violent display of naked rage that is pure destruction; the shadow of what I am, my personal fear, and what is always remembered about me by everyone, that I am fire and I am dangerous, I am wild and without restraint, I am capable of causing harm to everyone around me whether intentional or not, and though I dance whimsically through the air and burn with a luminous gusto, it only takes a little gasoline to turn that into an ugly and terrifying wrath. I am an ember.

    But through these musings of mine, I have perhaps discovered a different kind of ember.

    Fire is wild, perhaps that is my best definition for who I am, I am not grounded nor do I desire to be. I rail against being caged and do not stay in one place or on one subject for long, I become withered in any type of confinement, I must always seek new things, but this is not unlike the most elusive of human psychology, creativity, something so untamed and misunderstood, mysterious and whimsical, that it cannot be controlled, it cannot be bottled and stored away for later, it withers in confinement, like me, it needs to wander, it needs fuel, it needs freedom. It is also an ember.

    But it is the opposite of me; where my greatest challenge is dampening or channeling the ever-raging fire inside of me, this ember of mine is but a spark that I have difficulty kindling. At a point in my life several years past now when I was truly miserable and angry, I could kindle my spark with my own fire, anger fueled my creativity, deep-seeded, passionate hate, but now the two burn in different realms, one is diminished though still potent, and the other is but a small coal in which I am only aware of in those brief moments when I feel a warmness unlike the heat of rage. Inspiration. And inspiration is the flint on which we spark our creativity.

    Because so little is known about the creative process of humankind, I have no scientific basis for which to advise others. This is an issue of philosophy, it requires introspection on the part of the individual, but what I do know is that if anger is hard to smother, creativity is hard to kindle. It is like a wisp, a tiny blue flame burning so softly and giving off almost no light, but when it flares up to its full glory it spreads like wildfire through my entire body, motivating me to great leaps of creation and motivating me to do things such as paint or write these passionate entries. It does not burn slowly, it consumes every bit of inspiration in the soul, the world around, and then, like anger, it weakens and withers to the tiny cool ember it was before, and when it flares up again is an unknown to all, even the bearer of the tiny flame.

    These two embers are so opposite, one of destruction and the other of creation, yet they are so frighteningly alike, they coexist in my soul and effect my being in profound ways, and I can feel both of them, see them in my mind, and when the flame of creation flares inside of me I can taste its smoke on the exhale, which does not choke me like the smoke of my anger, but stimulates me to act, to create, to burn lively and dance in the light of my own ember.

Thursday, February 13, 2014

True Faith

    Around 1AM I made a speedpaint and posted it around the web around 2:30, after finally figuring out how to upload it as a jigsaw puzzle so people can play with my spontaneous art.
    Why? Because I want it to make people happy, and ifs omeone comes across it and it brings them a little warm feeling in their day, I consider that a victory.

    Around 3AM I started to have what I call a fear spike - that's when, for whatever reason, be it eating too much junk food, staying up when I'm tired, not getting enough vitamin K, or struggling with the horror that is existential crisis, my naturally extreme anxiety mounts into something that has a 50% chance of growing into a full-blown panic attack and if you have no idea what that looks like or god forbid feels like, I hope with all the sincerity in my heart you never do. Anyway, this happened frequently in Q2 and Q3 of last year, but around winter I finally was able to get adequate medical treatment and started getting really proactive about balancing the little things like diet and productivity that effect our chemical and mental health.

    But even so, these things still occur. And when they do, they make me look hard at my life, because even though fear spikes amplify all of your issues by a thousand, when you're feeling better, the issues are still there, and the best thin you can do is try to deal with them.

    In my case, I have dealt with this and several other problems related to my health for years - sometimes, my entire life. As a result, I am a very introspective person. Sometimes I will even dig into the parts of my soul that physically and mentally hurt to disturb so that I can understand a problem. Sometimes that only increases the intensity of my anxiety-laced depression but it also turns over a rock in my mind and shows me the absolute most disgusting things about myself, and when the shock and horror wears off, I can begin to accept those things, or try to change them.

    I say this because I want to go back to that picture I made earlier in the morning. It's a very light, dreamy picture. It's supposed to make you feel good looking at it. In fact, aside from some of my vent art, all of my art is focused on vibrant expression and feeling good in different ways.

    Sometimes, people believe I'm an optimist for that reason. I find that somewhat insulting because when I think of optimists, I think of people who deliberately turn the other cheek at the world's injustices and breeze through life by ignoring their problems instead of confronting them. I am a very confrontational person when it comes to my issues. So why, then, is my art so happy? Wouldn't it make more sense to draw your true feelings instead of fluffy happy things?

    The truth is that my art does contain my true feelings - I have looked at some of the ugliest things about myself and I have been in a lot of really depressing situations. I acknowledge the world's evils, I rage about them frequently, I talk to my close friends about how depressing life can be sometimes and I am a very intense, serious person but in spite of all that, I still see the patches of light in the darkness of our world.

    I consider myself a misanthrope - I don't hate people, but I hate some constructs of human society like anything having to do with money, separating people by class, the degenerate, petty ways in which we compete with each other for power and the aforementioned money, but don't hate individual people. I actually think humans as a species are incredibly flexible and steely at the same time. We are capable of imagination and even though the universe's lifespan has been calculated and is pretty much common knowledge, we continue to create, build, and thrive in the face of complete destruction. We are amazing in our ability to stare hard truths in the face and continue with our lives. In truth, I want to help people continue to do that. We are a strong species, and we hold each other up.

    I also consider myself a cynic - the idea that the only thing between me and uncertain death is the network of people I surround myself with who all have their own emotional crap to deal with and the doctors, police, firefighters, and everyday heroes who are not infallible and just as capable of screwing up as the rest of us is terrifying, but at the same time, we've survived for thousands of years and we really can support each other. We all have emotional crap and flaws to deal with, and when we all hold hands we can help hold each other up. Sometimes, one of my friends or myself needs others to compensate for their falling down, but the next day I might be bearing up under one of my friends who just needs to cry for a while.

    And that is beautiful to me. I am not putting a friendly face on a horrible concept; I'm acknowledging that there are things that frighten me but have genuinely found an aspect of something that speaks to me in a positive way.

    That's what I want my art to reflect.I want my art to be very human, I want to show people optimistic images that also speaks to them or that they can relate to. That is a tall order, but I think when we really explore humanity - all sides of it - we gain true faith in it, and it makes everything less scary.

Monday, December 23, 2013

Rough Edges

    A discussion on a forum prompted this entry, it made me think about what I consider the two primary opposing sides of the internet, and even though you could say this is true for real life as well, I find it reaches its extreme online, when people seem to devolve into the most basic components of their psyche. I'm talking about the polar opposites of people who are predators, tormenting others for fum and are seemingly untouchable, especially by the other side - the sensitive people who are easily hurt and more interested in genuine human contact than the distant relationships preferred by the former. It can usually be observed in its most primitive form when several callous individuals on a forum or in an IRC are verbally abusing someone who is probably crying into their keyboard as they type out rebuttals in all-caps.

    My natural inclination is to side with the latter; Regardless of the circumstances, I don't feel there is any honor in harassing someone weaker than you and seeing people gang up on someone of a weak constitution appalls me. I have an almost predesigned desire to defend the minority, but objectively that does not make the tormentors instantly villains.

    In fact, they're as much victims to a cycle I've observed over the years as the people they're hurting - because they're turning those people into them. All of these callous, pessimistic remarks people make cannot entirely be the result of trolling even if there are a few people who just want to stir the pot; no, most of it is just people repeating what the internet generation before them told them when they were probably crying into their keyboard, and most of them are too proud to admit that. They're spreading the toxicity of cynicism and misanthropy to the next generation and that generation will do the same thing to the next.

    Possibly the worst thing about all that is that even though there are few people willing to admit they were once the naive innocent newbie they are now trying to turn into a miserable cynic, there are even fewer of them that are willing to admit that even in a small way, the vitriol of others' poisoned words still hurt them. We have created an environment where having your feelings hurt is not acceptable and in doing so we've repressed encouraging compassion and humanity from everyone. Instead, people demand that everyone be as thick-skinned as they think they've become, but nobody seems to realize, or care, that thick skin can have rough edges, and in most cases, those edges are barbed with the poison of misery.

    Sometime ago I tried to be untouchable, I wanted to be able to bounce insults off my skin like others seemed to do so well, but after trying for a solid 3 years, I realized that it was not only impossible for me, but self-destructive. Now, my philosophy is that the healthiest thing to do for the sake of yourself and your relations with others of your species is to be honest about how you feel. I practice this in my daily life. If I see someone who looks like they're hurting, I try to reach out to them to the best of my ability and I am not afraid to be sincere even though I live in a time period when sincerity is viewed as weak and sarcasm is a mark of the strong and clever. I know that this makes me a target for people who are malcontent or for people who are just bored and trying to get a rise out of me, and I'm not going to pretend those people don't succeed because doing otherwise would mean they have no consequences to their actions, but what I'm more afraid of is that if someone doesn't show the kind of honest sincerity I demand of myself every single day, then there will be no example for others and we will always live in an emotionally repressed society.

    We humans feel emotions and are influenced by them. To ignore them or force them down is to deny ourselves of an inherent part of our nature, and when we start to accept and understand those emotions, we can be more understanding of the people around us.

    I'm a well-established misanthrope. I don't trust people by nature, but even with my innate suspicion, I don't believe the majority are trolls and the minor percentage of trolls that do exist are far outweighed by ordinary people who are hurting. My ideal world is one where people can freely exchange experiences of emotional pain without fear of being persecuted for it and I think that will be possible one day if we learn to shed our rough edges.