Questions and hope – revelations

Questions and hope – revelations

I wrote this to say the things I cannot bring myself to say. In this writing, I have tried to capture who I am on paper. I know it’s a long block of text, but please take the time to read and think about it.

Do you know what happiness is? If you do, you know at least one thing I don’t. Happiness. I have experienced every emotion but happiness.

The most important one of them all.

I have never, in my 19 years of life, known happiness.

Of course, this leads to the question “why have you never known happiness?” and I find this the one most difficult and complex answer to give. A lot of factors contribute to it. I’m going to tell you my life’s story, with all the parts I cannot bring myself to tell the people I know and love.

Note: my mother has a degree in psychology

My parents had what most of us call a political marriage. They married because of the mutual benefits, not out of love. Before you go hating on them, let me tell you that nothing is wrong with that and you shouldn’t hate them for that in and of itself. The real issue was that they were totally incompatible persona’s and because love was not their binding factor, they never seemed to care to adjust to each other.

Since early childhood, I have often been told by my mother that I was a burden to her, because I always got my clothes dirty and never cleaned up my mess, along with my brother and sister. My father wasn’t at home till late at night, and I didn’t see him in the morning. He was by all means a workaholic. Though when he got home, and especially late at night when I was in bed, I heard my parents arguing and fighting.

At school I was picked on. I was an easy target, emotional, didn’t want to draw attention to myself. That’s what they look for, not being fat or ugly by themselves. Calling someone fatty or ugly is only an extra means of the act of picking on somebody, the victim itself is chosen on how you react, if you REALLY fight back or not.

The funny thing is that, if you don’t fight back, your individuality will not be ensured. Not in human society. If you can’t hurt people without caring for what happens to you or them, your place in society – real society – becomes void.

But back to my story.

Instead of being caring, understanding and intelligent parents, mine – especially my mother – pursued the people who picked on me. And because of that, she forced me to tell exactly what happened. An emotionally scarred child has to tell what has caused the scar in the first place. And after that, she usually dragged me along to someone’s house to tell the people who live there that their child picked on someone else’s. Adding insult to injury and making my situation at school even worse.

My mother was picked on during her school years, so I understand that she wanted to make sure no matter what I wasn’t getting picked on. But her cause definitely blinded her and she caused far more damage to me doing it, than she could ever have solved.

At home I was an actor, faking happiness to keep my parents happy. I knew my parents couldn’t help me, even if they wanted to. They’d make things worse.

This environment eventually led to me developing suicidal tendencies. During most school trips, the thing I had on my mind was sticking my head out of that air vent/escape hole on top of the bus so my head would be ripped off by a bridge or something. Or I would jump off the bus. I would think about jumping in front of a bus when I saw one and think about hanging myself at home.

At the age of 10, we moved to a new house. It felt like a new start. But the first day we lived there, my parents got into a major fight and my sister pulled my brother and me to our new attic to hide from them and cry. If I were to choose the worst day of my life, I’ll pick that one. The hopes of starting anew were instantly crushed that day.

After that, things went pretty well. At my new school I wasn’t getting picked on, I even made some sort of friends. But then came along high school. My first year went kind of okay, but things went downhill very fast after that. I entered depression and social isolation, and got even unhappier than I was before, became more and more aggressive to myself, my parents and my environment and eventually became near homicidal. Because of the aggression and the life my parents had given me up till then, I started getting real issues with my parents. This was probably set off with me having to sign their divorce papers. I objected to it, because I KNEW they had never bothered to try to adjust to each other, they never bothered to really reconcile and I felt that I, my sister and brother were going to become the victims of their own incompetence, their own unwillingness to work things out. I learned a couple of years later that my mother was having an affair with some immigrant, who basically married her to get a passport, while she loved him.

Note: even though they got divorced, we all still lived in the same house. My mother went to Belgium every weekend, though.

I am a nice and emotional person at the core, and I really felt sorry for her. She eventually broke down, and with me being the only one strong enough, I was the one who had to comfort her. I heard her say she didn’t want to live anymore, she didn’t want to go through all the suffering any more. I understand why my siblings couldn’t handle being with her at that moment. She had suffered all her life, some by the choice of others, some by her own choice and at that point it all came out. I was relatively sure that my brother and sister were living a relatively life then, and such sadness, most happy people cannot bear to hear or feel. They run away from it, don’t want to see it. It is the thing they fear most, losing their own happiness.

Things stayed the same after that. As a family we started to fall apart more and more. I think I was the major contributor or at least the catalyst of this due to my aggressive behavior. I hated my parents for real. I hated my siblings for real. And looking back, I don’t fully understand why I made them the targets of my hate. Maybe because they were easy targets. Maybe because I didn’t dare to hate my class mates or use violence against them. The disgusting irony.

After high school, I entered university. Once again a fresh start. By then, my parents had basically stopped correcting me. The fruits of my labour. At first I mistakenly thought it was because they thought I was mature now. Now I know they simply didn’t know me anymore. I know they still care, but I wonder how long that will last. When people stop correcting you, they have given up hope.

It hurts. Knowing full well I am what caused my current situation with my parents, I wish I could take it all back. I know I can’t. After all the misery and powerlessness they’ve caused me, I still love them in a small fraction of my heart. After all, they are my parents and they are the only parents I will ever have.

Even now, I don’t have a social life. People probably think I’m arrogant, a know-it-all, angry, sad and most probably a fuck up of society. I don’t know.

… I have a condition called Asperger’s syndrome. I lack any sort of nonverbal communication skills, have significant difficulties in social interaction, don’t understand the clue of most jokes. It is not a disease or disability that can be cured with medication or therapy. It is a condition I have to live with. I am different in my way of thinking and acting, I see other things than you do. It’s like my world is lit by fluorescent lamps (TL-tubes) while everyone else’s light is lit by the sun.

Negative things, especially ugliness, become far more apparent in the light of a fluorescent lamp. You could say that I see a completely different reality than other people.

Because of all these things, I started asking myself questions. I shall answer them for myself now.

Do I still want to continue living like this? I don’t know. The heart, when it is not filled with happiness, it becomes empty. And when that happens, anger, sadness, pain take its place. It is the most painful thing I know, and I will eventually break down if I continue like this. Maybe that would be a fitting end to this life.

Have I lost hope? No. But the hope remaining is very small. It has been very small for very long now, and maybe it is shrinking. I notice I laugh less than I used to, even when I hated everything. I wonder how long I can keep hope, not consider myself a lost cause.

Have I lost hope for humanity? No, not yet. But I know that chances of humanity ever learning and ever maturing are very very slim. Because we all look up, to things that could potentially make us happy – mobile phones, friendships, love, facebook, hyves, internet, education, work – we don’t see what is in front of us or below us. If we all looked at least in front of us, we already would have seen that as things are now, Armageddon is our destiny. If we continue becoming more and individualistic, not caring about someone else’s opinion, not standing up for an old lady/man in the bus, if we continue picking on those who are weak while the majority just stands around, watches and does nothing, we will be the end of ourselves. It would be a brutal and fitting end to the crimes we have committed against each other.

One of the most disturbing things I have come to learn this past year is that most of us will not even remember the atrocities we committed during high school and in our social life a few years after. We don’t remember how we forced that girl to give us a blow job in the garage at school, we won’t remember how we beat that guy to a bloody pulp, nearly killing him. We won’t remember putting out cigarettes on someone’s head, we won’t remember talking that one fat girl into anorexia nervosa with our constant singling her out.

We simply won’t remember. And this is the largest crime you can commit to your victims. Forgetting the atrocities you have committed, forgetting about the damage you have caused.

We, as humanity need to change. We can talk crap about how bad everything in the world is, and not seeing a way out, simply because it makes passivity legitimate. We can blame media, politicians everybody else, but that is nonsense. By always blaming someone else for our current problems, you ARE the problem, by ignoring the problems you are contributing to them. We cannot change others, and neither do we need fucking cooking workshops or any of that bullshit for ourselves to change. What you need in order to change, is yourself and the will to change. Learning to let go of a little bit of personal happiness in return for an increase of general happiness is going to be – whether we want to face that reality or not – very difficult. But it’s the only way to advance peacefully. Our other options for maturing ourselves would be bombing ourselves back to the stone age or randomly killing about 90% of the world’s population.

At this moment, the latter two are the most likely options.

Face your problems, your issues, your shortcomings. Work around them, beat them. Like I am now. If we do not do this, our future is very grim.

I know I have to change, and I am already changing. I know I have to learn to be social. I know I have to get a taste of happiness. If I am not ever-changing, it means I am standing still. And when I stand still, only unhappiness awaits me. I cannot afford to stand still, and neither can you.

Change.