How Not To Love

I have a complicated ego.  (Don't we all?)  It shields me from reality, keeping me lost in the sea of its preconceived notion of itself.  And then shields me from the crap that its preconceived notion emits by rationalizing it into something else. Ultimately, how I end up seeing myself is completely different from how others see me.   Who gets the correct view of whom I am?  Neither.  Both are pretty much fucked up.

When it comes to shit like that, friendships can be, and will get, utterly destroyed.  And my ego, in its attempt to take the moral high ground by attempting to not judge their responses, can't see what harm has been done to that other person.  Completely oblivious really.  It's so messed up.

What it ultimately comes down to is my ego butting heads with someone else's ego.  And my ego will not let me see that that is what I'm doing.  Yes, my battered and bruised ego, injured from decades of abuse, screams out acidic tirades in frustration, all the while telling me it's simply expressing a truth that other people need to understand.  No concept of whether it's appropriate or even relevant.  It's oblivious to that reality.  And then my ego has the audacity to be confused and offended, if that screaming is rejected, dismissed or challenged.

So what am I going on about?
Me shoving my Dirty Laundry into other people's faces.

No one likes that shit.  No one.  It's a lose-lose.  Always has been, always will be.

I would have imagined that in time I could open up to people.  Come out of the closet about this blog.  To remove the anonymity and let it stand as a connection to my past.  Show how I've worked through things, and come to learn who I am.  But now, I'm not so sure this blog should exist.  It may need to disappear completely and permanently off the Internet.  I may need to disappear completely and permanently off the Internet too.

All the plans I had, wiped out by my own arrogance and smug self-righteousness.  Oblivious I was.  Fucking oblivious.  Patting myself on the back for all the great work I've done only to find I've done nothing but make enemies where I had none before.  They had done NOTHING to me.  They had been patiently putting up with my bullshit for DECADES.  They had defended me and stood-up for me when I was at my most assholishness.  They didn't give a shit that I was gay.  They didn't give a shit I left the church.  And then, I turn around and spit on them to feed my little bruised ego.  What was I trying to gain from that?  A reason to say, "Oh poor me. Look, see, no one really likes me."   Self induced pity.   This entire blog has turned into a pity party for me.  What the fuck was I thinking?

I don't care if people think that they shouldn't have been offended by what I was doing.  That's no excuse.  Why? Because deep down I knew that what I was doing was going to offend.  I may not have known why, or how or who specifically, but I did know it would offend, on purpose.  I was trying to push buttons. 

I have written and spoken at times about how it is not my responsibility to protect other people's view of the world by compromising who I am.  I still mean it.  It's just that in this case, I crossed the line and compromised myself in an attempt to selfishly destroy someone else's view of the world.  That's a big difference!  When my view of the world changed, it wasn't because someone was shoveling it on me.  I did it on my own because I needed to do it.  But then I snapped.  Something had triggered my pain. I quickly forgot my experiences and selfishly expected that others needed their world view changed.  Even when it was working perfectly well for them, maybe even better than the one I was currently trying to shovel.  It was pure hypocrisy from a lapse of self-awareness.

I can say it like I see it but it doesn't matter if buttons are purposely pushed.  They will only create conflict and close hearts, hearts that have been so willing to work with me and let me be myself.  Hearts that put up with the button pushing until it became so toxic that they had to shut down to protect themselves from annihilation.  Pushing to that point is poison.  It's healthy to remove toxic people from your life.  But I didn't realize that I would be the toxin.  I lost my awareness of that.

But get this, even though I had been pushing buttons for decades, the weird thing was, only recently had I become aware I had been purposely pushing buttons.  That seems odd, doesn't it?  The ego was in charge, and I was oblivious. I had not understood how stupid it was.  How destructive, how evil.  In fact, my ego thought it was just the way I do things.  I even told people in all confidence that I'm the type that needs to test people.  As if "on purpose" wasn't really "on purpose".  I really thought I had figured that part out. I was proud of myself.  Oblivious to what it really truly was.  Oblivious to what others already knew.  A character flaw, personality disorder, mental illness, whatever.  It is all those things but most importantly, to the unbeknown victim, it is the definition of an asshole.

But then I realized what I was doing was wrong.  I understood that it was a flaw, I understood its error and acknowledged it, I even stopped doing it, or so my ego told me.  No, I hadn't stopped doing it at all.  I had only stopped doing it to new friends.  I was still doing it to my old friends.   I wasn't aware that my habitual, destructive behavior had not gone away.  I was still a raging asshole.  After all these years, after all I've gone through.  Still, a raging asshole.


I need to forgive myself and move on.  The damage is done.  No amount of apology will be believed at this point.  I brought that on myself.  It's over.  Some may forgive me.  I may never know.   I don't know what else I can do other than take the punches as they are returned.  And they are still punching.  It's their right.

I could say that I love my friends but if I really do, then I would be letting them live their life just like they have been letting me live mine.  So until I can lean to do that, I'm not capable of truly loving someone.  But, I want to love, so I'm going to keep trying.


You know, this entire blog was set up to air my Dirty Laundry.  I haven't always used it for that but that's what its main purpose was.  Why on earth would I think that anyone would want to read it?  And I hope that no one finds it.  Because if they think the shit I put on Facebook was offensive, most of which I don't even write, wait until they read the drivel here.

And that's another thing, if I could just fucking stop airing my Dirty Laundry on Facebook.  Of all the places not to do that, Facebook would be the one.  There really are places I can go which would be appropriate, for one, the therapist's chair, and here, once I make it a private blog.  It will do no good to try and erase the past.  The internet has made that impossible.  I'll have to own up to it eventually.

I do not pity myself for all this mess, so for hell's sake don't pity me.  I believe this is the essence of the human condition, to live, learn, and love.  I'm doing my best with what I have and there are bumps along the way.  And what I've learned so far is how not to love.