Rage

It’s whats left. When you run out of hope. When you runout of despair. When you’re out of tears but not out of pain. A last ditch effort by your self to re-emerge. It’d a dark hope substitute. An endless yawning. Expressing the gulf between what you calculate to be your most ideal state and the way you are now.

Think of it as all the things you would change. If these could dig a hole and fill it with lava, that would be a great image for rage.

Depression gets all the attention. It’s such a diva. Always vacant and imitating death. But rage is what is past that. It’s the offensive version of depression. The luminous, voluminous and indisputable anti-depression.

Rage doesn’t mean you’re okay. But it’s a damn good likeness.

It’s evolutionary in origin. I find it too useful to be an accident. The gory trail of human development seems too horrible to not have spawned it as a defense. When the question was whether I should sulk in bed or get up and seethe at my circumstance, I chose the latter because of rage. Every moment I spent smoldering in the daylight, thinking of revenge was ultimately healthier than if I had spent that time lying prostrate on my bed pitying myself. The time outside showed me the blue sky. It showed me the life around me. It distracted me. The rage tricked me into accepting it as a more practical consolation prize. Bypassing the grand prize of depression.

The rage was motion. Good for my muscles. The rage was consumptive. Good for my appetite. It was addictive. Got my attention. It filled a hole. Good for level headedness.

I didn’t want to die when I was pissed off. I waned to win. I now realize that my mind probably used that as a trick to keep me alive. It worked. My gullibility kept me alive. My rage kept me awake. They both distracted me from the edge, the ledge, the precipice, the end. I’m not sure that I totally agree with how I was manipulated by my brain. But all I’m saying is that it worked. The proof is that I’m saying it. Ergo I’m not gone like the 8:00 a.m. train at 8:04 a.m.

I owe rage.

I attest to the propelling force of it.

Yet for all its uses, and in all its facets, I wonder, how do I get past it?

Near Sighted

My fist flaw was my eyes. You see I’m what they call myopic. This is a literal fact that I live with every day. My inferior sight was my first metaphor. You see I’m also a mild autistic. I cant see it! All the things I’m supposed to know how to do in a social context, I don’t. I don’t know exactly when to laugh or the difference between, its embarrassing laugh; and its embarrassing so let it alone. I’m the kind of jerk who snickers at funerals, speaks out of turn, changes a conversation mid sentence and falls in love with moments. I am the very embodiment of uniqueness. Normal for me is like a river; you never cross the same one twice.

Early in my life I discovered this fact. I then sought for a solution to the problem. The most obvious and expedient solution was to simply be like everyone else. So I decided to define just who everyone else exactly is. The problem that soon came to light was simply put: there is no such thing as ‘everyone else.’ Each man is an individual and a story all to himself.

So the facts as they stood then were: I exist. I am different. I want to be the same in a general sense.

To expound on the last item of the preceding paragraph, I would like to say that I should have seen this coming. Since there is no ‘standard’ normal person, I would pick a person and ‘do’ them. I first picked my dad as my other options were the family dog and my older sister.

This  worked well until round age ten. At this time my inability to grow up without dumping that early shell became obvious. Being the resolute coward and budding social scientist that I was I decided to run more than one personality. One to cover my home base and keep father unit bamboozled. And the other to survive in a society that was increasingly intolerant of useless relics aka my middle aged father’s mind.

At first, and mainly because I had never done it before, the characters started to melt and alloy. This is the only time wherein my character was any kind of original. The frequent weekends and school breaks helped me separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem was that I kept the chaff instead of the wheat. He was happy as long as I was like him. She loved aspects of me but hated herself for thinking that she was responsible for me turning into that page of red ink; my father.

In high school I had a unique opportunity to change the state of things. I shed both personae:  the Father one, and the decent primary school student one, in one wash. It was one of the clearest moments of my life. I think all the bullshit was made inert in that moment. Then came the son of all unintended consequences: apathy.

I’m still riding that last kick. I don’t see it now same as ever. The difference it that I don’t want to see it anymore. I have diagnosed my true flaw: the people around me. I have a disease, a cancer flowing through me and attacking my very self and apathy is the cure!